Carl Weinschenk spoke with Andrew Borg, a senior research analyst for Wireless and Mobility with The Aberdeen Group. Borg’s latest mobility research, released this month, is titled “More Mobility — Less Budget: Enterprise Strategies in the Current Economic Downturn.”

Weinschenk: What is mobile device management?
Borg: It’s the notion of centralized over-the-air deployed device control.

Weinschenk: You say that best-practice approaches to managing mobile devices in a corporate setting are changing. How so?
Borg: One of the findings we reported is an influx of employee-liable devices. That’s typically a device owned by the employee and used for company business. Typically, the contract with the carrier is held by the employee, who may be compensated, or expensed against the company ledger. This is a growing phenomenon we call “devices from the edge” that we tracked across several reports. All of the percentages that I am going to refer to are based on data culled from our online surveys.

In January ’08, less than 10 percent of respondents purchased mobile devices from any vendor and over 76 percent were purchased by the company from a carrier. By the end of ’08, over 40 percent were purchased by the employee from any vendor. Less than 40 percent were purchased by the company from a carrier. The other segment is devices bought by employees from authorized vendors.

Weinschenk: Why is this happening?
Borg: There are two reasons. The first is that this is coming in a timeframe when better devices are coming from the consumer space, which now is the prosumer space. Devices from vendors such as HTC, LG, Samsung and others … are approaching or exceeding the enterprise devices from RIM, Motorola and Nokia. Devices obtained for personal use are as or more capable than the former quote-unquote enterprise devices. The prosumer versus enterprise division no longer is relevant. We now assume that the mobile device environment is increasingly heterogeneous.

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