You might say it’s a one-two-three punch coming from MobileIron today. The company introduced Release 2.0 of its Virtual Smartphone Platform, giving more control to IT departments and employees who want to make the most productive use of their smartphones.
There are three parts to the new release: MyPhone@Work, Event Center and the Enterprise App Store.
MyPhone@Work gives workers a searchable history of their communications, similar to how one might look up an old e-mail. The Event Center is a customizable event engine to track and respond to potential security, cost or quality problems. For example, it can reduce roaming costs by capturing international roaming use as it happens and let employees know when they need to get on the proper roaming plan.
The Enterprise App Store component allows IT to customize the store and publish approved internal and external apps, noting whether they are supported and/or reimbursed.
As MobileIron CEO Bob Tinker explains it, smartphones are proliferating in the enterprise, a situation driven by employees, many of whom want to bring in their own devices. IT has less control than desired but still gets stuck with the accountability.
Under a model of what he calls “cooperative mobility,” the management of smartphones gets shared more fairly between employees and their corporate IT departments. In the end, users want to do the right thing; the key is driving behavior. “It really is about self-governance with IT guidance,” he says.
“The same things people expect on their desktop … a lot of that activity is moving to mobile,” he says. At the same time, it’s important to balance the information that IT needs with the privacy of the end user.
Release 2.0 will be available across all the operating systems that MobileIron supports, including BlackBerry, Windows, iPhones, Nokia Symbian and Palm webOS, with Android support coming next year. MobileIron adds platforms based on what its enterprise customers are asking for, Tinker says.
One of MobileIron’s customers is Netgear, a global networking products company where mobility plays an important role in running the business. Generally, MobileIron’s enterprise customers have more than 1,000 users.
