Managed mobility: The next front in ICT wars
Jeremy Green and Jan Dawson
26/07/2007

Managed mobility is emerging as the next front in the ICT wars, and mobile operators need to be aware of the emerging threat from IT services providers.

Both the IT services market and the telecoms market have historically been high-growth industries, with company valuations to match. However, both have struggled to replicate past growth in recent years and this has pushed telecom providers and IT services providers into each other's markets in search of bigger opportunities. So far, the main focus of these efforts has been to tie together enterprise local area and wide area networking with management of those networks and the associated applications and desktops.

IT service providers' push into the networking space is a threat to the wireline service providers, but one which most providers are aware of and have been responding to. However, mobility in a broad sense is becoming a major plank of most IT service providers' offerings, and as such there is a new threat emerging, this time to mobile operators and the mobile arms of integrated operators.

What is driving this push into mobility for the IT service providers is the increasing replication of the desktop computing environment on mobile devices. Email was the first application to be widely deployed in this way, and often provides the underlying platform for further applications: a smart device and an unlimited data plan. Other applications - notably CRM and field service software - are being added to this picture, while completely new applications such as asset tracking and fleet management are also being rolled out.

Mobile email has been relatively simple to deploy, since it was often the only significant non-voice application running on a device, it is essentially generic (with little or no customisation of the application itself required) and often comes as part of a productised service provider offering based on RIM's BlackBerry or another specialist system.

However, the newer applications which are being deployed require more complex integration with existing systems serving desktop users and often also require considerable customisation. And the more applications are running on a mobile device, the more additional issues such as application conflicts, memory capacity and other such issues are thrown up. Although enterprises often start with a more generic flavour of an application, once it has been bedded in they want to add more and more layers of customisation and integration to ensure higher performance and a more tailored experience for their users.

In addition, the smarter devices in use today in many enterprises are themselves significant drivers of complexity. Smartphones and PDAs increasingly resemble desktop and laptop computers in terms of the security risks, application management, upgrades and patches and other tasks which need to be managed in order to keep them running effectively and secured against theft and loss.

- Jeremy Green is Principal Analyst of Enterprise Mobility and Jan Dawson is Vice President of US Enterprise Practise.

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