Do employees in your company have Blackberrys, iPhones, Treos? Managing all those mobile devices, associated rate plans, services, applications, and offers can be overwhelming. Yankee Group's Steve Hilton, discusses how managed mobility solutions can put you back your IT staff back in control.
Each month, SMB expert Steve Hilton of Yankee Group answers real reader questions about small and midsize business.
How many employees in your firm have a mobile device? Did your employer issue you the mobile device and pay for it under a corporate plan? Imagine being that poor stiff in the IT department managing all those mobile devices, associated rate plans, services, applications, and offers. Oh that's you? You're that poor IT stiff? Well have you considered managed mobility solutions? Sandra Palumbo, Yankee Group's Director of Enterprise Research, joins to Steve Hilton to discussed managed mobility in this month's Ask Steve.
Barry from Newark, N.J. asks: A lot of our employees have Blackberrys -- a few have iPhones -- and every day more employees want support. How do we manage all this? A consultant told me about managed mobility. What are your thoughts?
Steve: Let's start with a definition. Managed mobility solutions rely on third-party service providers to manage all or some of the functions associated with a corporate mobility deployment. These functions include:
- Device management and security: Security specifically, but also security and management, are routinely named as barriers to corporate mobility solution adoption. With already overworked IT teams that need to focus on a variety of technologies and strategies, third-party expertise in these areas can augment an internal IT staff.
- Telecom expense management (TEM): Probably the area most commonly associated with managed mobility, this function includes managing the bills and contracts for corporate-purchased mobility solutions.
- Vendor management: Anyone that has ever had to call an operator's customer service department knows the trials and tribulations of customer support, contract negotiation, problem resolution, and ongoing relationship issues. Having a third party take on these areas will make sense to companies that have a variety of complex relationships or a sizeable mobility device deployment.
- Provisioning/hardware service: Most often linked to TEM, this function facilitates communications with operators and vendors for new orders, replacements, and resolutions of setup problems. All of these activities can be extremely time-consuming, taking employees away from their main job functions and reducing the productivity of the employee whose devices are unavailable for a period of time.
- Mobile application development and management: As the most forward-looking segment of managed mobility, businesses that require custom applications deployed to mobile devices will look to a third-party partner to aid in technical application development, implementation, integration, and ongoing maintenance.
- Managed connectivity: Mainly associated with the management of wireless LANs, this is one area of mobility that is not specifically related to mobile devices or endpoints but instead private corporate networks.
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Yankee Group expects the market to grow from roughly $81.6 million in 2006 to more than $350 million by 2009. According to the Yankee Group between 11% and 35% of U.S. businesses are using managed services for at least a portion of their mobility needs.
Managed mobility solutions are more highly adopted by large businesses in the U.S.; however, of the largest multi-national corporations only 19% use managed solutions for all their mobility management needs. The vast majority of businesses does a combination of in-house (do-it-yourself) and outsourced management of mobility solutions.
So you're not alone in your discontent managing all the mobile assets at your company. Who can provide a reprieve from doing it all yourself? Movro Technology, Tangoe, Enterprise Mobile, and Integrated Mobile as well as network service providers such as Sprint and AT&T offer managed mobility solutions to small and large businesses. However, the smaller your business the less likely you'll be able to engage the services of these more specialty managed mobility companies. Best bet for those SMBs would be to seek the services of your network service provider. SMBs should also check with their channel partners, VARs, agents, dealers, etc. to see what solutions or professional services they offer for support.
Thanks for the question Barry.
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Steve Hilton is VP of Enterprise and SMB research at Yankee Group. Hilton is recognized as a leading, global SMB expert.
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