The growing use of powerful and compact mobile devices for personal use makes their appearance in business IT development plans inevitable. Faced with the option of pocketing an ultraportable device or lugging around a hefty laptop and its associated power supply in a carrying case, most people would opt for the former. IT has to acknowledge this and start to plan for a broader range of devices connecting to the network in future.
Laptops already constitute the majority of new PCs deployed by businesses and as firms ask their staff to work from home, on the road and in the field more often, greater portability will only be accentuated whether it comes from smaller laptops, smartphones, wireless communications or new categories of product altogether.
Of particular interest at the moment is the status of smartphones in the enterprise. The challenge today is that the sheer range of devices and operating systems makes it difficult to cater for everything and everyone, and there is no real leader to narrow down the options. This makes the situation different from the days when laptops punched the first holes in corporate containment policies and IT managers had to start to think outside the confines of the corporate network. Although the arrival of mobile PCs was a challenge, at least they all had the same characteristics and nearly all were based on DOS or Windows.
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Portable six pack
There are already at least six main operating systems in current smartphone ranges: Symbian, Windows Mobile, Research In Motion (RIM)’s BlackBerry OS, various Linux variants, Java and Apple iPhone. However none has gained a globally dominant position. This situation looks like getting worse before it gets better and there are other operating systems in the offing, notably Google’s Android platform.
Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, observes that because of the disparate nature of operating systems, the first decision made by managers should be around overall policy.
“The business strategy for now should be based on the fact that smartphones are still evolving and are not yet at the end point of their development,” he says. “The focus should be on reducing overall complexity to enable a company to anticipate and embrace change because the busines-ses that can take advantage of change will be those that move most quickly.”
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