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Analysis: Mobile Device Management: Page 8 of 22

If you're already running Novell ZENworks or Avocent LANDesk to manage your desktop systems (or are adopting a new desktop and server management system), using these products to manage your mobile devices makes a lot of sense. All your administrators can work from a common system. And at a relatively low incremental cost per device, we figure adding handheld management into your existing management suite is a no-brainer. Although pure-play MDM vendors say they can support your desktop environments too, if you're trying to manage tens of thousands of desktops we can see where Novell ZENworks or LANDesk would have the edge. We'd place all four products we tested on our shortlist.

Although the products we tested were from vendors that focus on mobility, keep an eye on conventional device-management vendors. With Symantec (which has experience in developing mobile security products) purchasing Altiris (a leading device-management company), we expect this arena to continue to develop and gain even greater parity with systems from mobile-centric vendors (see Interview, page 80). Whether mobile vendors will try to make further inroads into the desktop-management sector remains to be seen.

A final note about standardization: We've heard complaints about its absence among mobile device platforms, even on the same OS, within the mobile industry for a while. Two solutions exist: Develop a standard hardware profile, as you would do for your PCs, or develop a standard way of performing device management. The good news is Nokia and other vendors are pushing for OMA DM (Open Mobile Alliance Device Management), a standards-based approach that should allow for device management at lower layers of the hardware stack. Right now, OMA DM is carrier-centric, but there have been efforts to tie OMA DM more tightly to enterprise device-management platforms. We hope to see more traction in this area over the next year.

What About Rim?

We'll admit it: We've been ignoring the 500-pound gorilla in the room. Research In Motion's BlackBerry is one of the top mobile device platforms in the world, so it is certainly worthy of discussion. The fact is, RIM's BlackBerry is a strong, albeit partially proprietary, system. Our review was focused on device-management systems that offered cross-platform compatibility; alas, RIM doesn't do that yet.

RIM has gotten a lot of knocks from competitors and some analysts for not being a good application-development platform, but in speaking to technology pros, one finds that's not entirely the case. Northrop Grumman, for example, standardized on the BlackBerry platform originally for mobile e-mail, then expanded its use to PIM (personal information management), then to enterprise applications (primarily specific field-service-automation apps, but some CRM apps as well), says Keith Glennan, CTO at Northrop Grumman. RIM's BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) has been used exclusively as the company's handheld management and security platform.