Users, firms at odds on mobile devices

By Stephen Lawson
Network World Fusion, 01/10/05

Companies and their employees might find themselves in a tug of war over enterprise-class mobile phones, an emerging set of devices that can run multimedia entertainment, games and business applications.

With these high-function handhelds, companies finally have a platform that's fully mobile, almost always connected and powerful enough to use for applications that certain employees need on the road, such as salesforce automation and CRM. But IT executives are bracing themselves for future threats, including attacks that might come through consumer applications. At the same time, businesses are seeking ways to keep the cost of personal phone use out of their expenses and some service providers are responding.

"There's no device that's in worse shape in terms of manageability than a smart phone because for years [the cell phone] has been a personal device," says Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney.

Examples of enterprise network-oriented devices include the Nokia 6820 smart phone and 9300 wireless phone-PDA, the palmOne Treo 650, the Siemens SK65 and SX66, Motorola's MPX and Research In Motion's voice-equipped wireless PDAs.

In September, IDC forecast converged phone and data devices to outsell ordinary handheld data devices both worldwide and in the U.S. For 2004, it projected sales of 17.7 million converged devices worldwide and 4.8 million in the U.S., compared with 9.4 million data handhelds worldwide and 3.6 million in the U.S. Nearly 15% of those converged devices would go to enterprise accounts, IDC said.

At October's CTIA Wireless IT & Entertainment trade show, where vendors and operators promised nonstop fun for consumers in the form of games, photo sharing, video, custom ring tones and other applications and content, service providers also pushed the new devices as business tools.

Business applications should start hitting smart phones in vertical industries in the first half of 2005 and in general corporations in the second half, according to David Hayden, co-founder, president and CEO of consultancy MobileWeek. Consumer use of advanced data services is just getting started. Probably less than 10% of users are buying games or exchanging photos over the air, he says.

"Most people don't download and most people don't even use the picture messaging," Hayden says.

The potential benefits of mobile devices are clear to Steve Philpott, president of Bearing Belt Chain, an industrial equipment distributor in Las Vegas, who has replaced three sales representatives' conventional PDAs with palmOne Treo 650 phone-PDAs. He plans to get five more Treos. With the old PDAs, salespeople had to synchronize data with their office PCs before they went on the road. With the Treos, they can change plans in the middle of a trip and still have a chance to synchronize all the data they need, which also is more up to date, Philpott says. A side benefit to the combination device is that there is one less thing for an employee to misplace, he says.

But companies are embracing the new devices cautiously.

Northwestern Mutual, an insurance and financial company in Milwaukee, gives employees only simple mobile phones and works with the service provider to prevent all uses except for voice, says Phil Zwieg, vice president of IS at Northwestern. The company is looking at adopting combination devices for e-mail and voice, but there are hurdles to overcome, such as security, Zwieg says. He has been particularly disturbed by recent reports of cell phone viruses. Northwestern won't introduce such devices until it understands the security mechanisms it needs to put in place, he says.

The director of telecom at a large U.S. chemical company, who asked not to be named, likewise still is studying the deployment of data-capable phones. His team is considering what applications need to be provided on mobile devices. E-mail and Web browsing for executives, plus access to management systems for technical support staff, are among the possibilities, he says. He's looking for a high-performance device with substantial storage, which raises potential problems.

"A phone is carried everywhere, whereas a laptop that an employee takes home, stays at home," the telecom director says. Top concerns include proprietary information getting into the wrong hands and possible misuse of stolen company information that would put its name in a bad light, he says.

An enterprise-class phone might hold sensitive business contacts, and inventory and sales information, says Bob Egan, president of consultancy Mobile Competency. An employee who uses that phone at a consumer Web site might put that data at risk, he says.

"One minute they're doing something in a very sanitized company environment, and the next, they're in a consumer environment," he says. Operators of Web sites often haven't looked at potential risks when translating them from conventional Web pages to ones for mobile devices, Egan says. He says dangers, such as viruses, data theft and denial-of-service attacks will be bigger on phones than they are on PCs because phones are more often connected and there are more of them.

Many of these devices also could give interlopers a way into a secure enterprise network through VPNs, Gartner's Dulaney says.

To maintain control, companies are taking a hard line, starting with corporate policies, and want more tools to do so.

Bearing Belt forbids employees to use company phones for personal calls, makes them sign a contract to that effect and audits their phone bills, Philpott says.

The chemical company telecom director expects employees to use the phones as personal devices sometimes, within policies, but he wants to apply the same rules to phone use that are in place for PCs. This includes a policy against downloading anything to the device itself, so employees have to keep any personal content on removable storage. He also wants itemized bills in order to break out personal use. Another measure would be the ability to erase or encrypt all the data on a device remotely in case it is lost or stolen.

Dulaney sees mobile device management moving in that direction.

"The company will have to own it, and as such, they'll build an image for it, and they'll manage that image," Dulaney says.

Lawson is a correspondent with the IDG News Service.

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