"iPhone mania" has come -- and gone on and on and on, making its mark on the wireless industry.
The strong interest in the iPhone points to a larger trend -- subscribers in increasing numbers are using mobile smartphones and are increasingly using them to store and transmit data.
According to recent research from Coleman Parkes, nearly 60 percent of managers and 30 percent of staff in top U.S. enterprises use smartphones as strategic business tools. Smartphone usage, especially among non-managerial staff, is expected to increase significantly.
Currently, these users employ their smartphones primarily for e-mail 
and calendar support , but going forward, they will use their smartphones to access a broader range of applications, including VoIP, sales force applications, and company file-share systems.
Pricey Support
As smartphones become more complex and support more diverse services and applications, they are beginning to seem less like cell phones and more like PCs. Industry data shows that the more complex the mobile device, the more costly it is for operators to support. Today the average support call for a smartphone lasts 45 minutes, at a cost to the operator of US$63 per call.
The newest generation of mobile services and applications requires additional management capabilities, which can create a major headache for both wireless operators and enterprises. If a smartphone subscriber calls the operator with a problem, the operator cannot see what is wrong, and does not know if the problem is in the device or the network or the application. Support personnel have to ask a lot of questions, and may need to call the user back with answers or even get physical access to the device to check the problem.
Smartphones also pose a new type of security risk for enterprises. Employees want to bring their personal mobile devices into the workplace, but these devices can hold a lot of corporate data -- the iPhone has 8GB of memory, as do many other smartphones -- that is vulnerable to unauthorized access and theft. Enterprises must be prepared to incorporate and support all types of smartphones, making these devices compliant with their security and management policies.
A Greater Need for Mobile Device Management
The growing use of ever more powerful smartphones means that both operators and enterprises need sophisticated mobile device management (MDM) solutions that work over the air and implement some of the tools and processes currently used for managing laptops and other IT assets. In other words, an MDM solution needs to manage the mobile experience from the network core to the smartphone and to manage the entire lifecycle of applications and services.
The value of MDM starts when the customer activates a smartphone; MDM solutions can provision and configure all types of mobile devices throughout their lifecycle and also distribute, update, manage and remove mobile applications. Because MDM solutions can provide visibility into the device and real-time access to information about its state, both operators and enterprises can find, diagnose and fix customer problems over the air. This significantly shortens the time it takes to solve problems and reduces management costs while increasing subscriber satisfaction and productivity.
In fact, with an MDM system in place, support teams may even receive a far lower volume of service calls. Because MDM can provide real-time insight into the actual customer experience of voice and data services, you can proactively find and solve bottlenecks and other performance problems before they affect the customer.
Taking Control
MDM provides a high degree of visibility and control over all devices that hold corporate data, thus reducing security risks. MDM can provide core device security capabilities, including locking lost phones, wiping stolen phones, backing up critical information and restoring it if something goes wrong.
Granular control features enable the operator to turn on and off such features as Bluetooth 
, WiFi and the camera. MDM also provides another layer of security by mobilizing solutions that work well in the fixed environment, from encryption and anti-virus to VPNs (virtual private networks) and firewalls. MDM automatically distributes, provisions, applies, updates, adjusts and decommissions these applications on mobile devices as needed, over the air.
The breadth of applications and services that run on smart devices represent a large step away from the past, when devices could perform only a limited set of functions. Operators and enterprises have the challenge of ensuring that all devices on their networks are set up and managed appropriately and that they have the management tools in place to keep on top of what smart devices offer.
Without the proper management tools, operators and enterprises risk the chance that the time and cost of responding to customer problems will increase even further. However, with an MDM solution that can manage devices automatically, detect and resolve issues before they cause customer problems, and slash the time and cost of support calls, operators and enterprises might feel they have entered a new and better era of mobile device management.
Matt Bancroft is chief marketing officer at Mformation Technologies, a provider of mobile device management software.
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