Dell Partners with Vonage to Put BYOD Controls in the Cloud

The downside of the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon is that it creates a lot of organizational confusion, ranging from who pays for the phone bill when employees use their own phones to how to enforce compliance policies. Looking to comprehensively address those issues, Dell today announced it has partnered with Vonage to offer a Dell Mobile Workspace service that includes access to a virtual smartphone, which end users can use to make phone calls via the cloud.

In addition to phone services, Neal Foster, general manager of Dell Software’s Enterprise Mobility Solutions, says Dell Mobile Workspace also provides access to email and storage services that are managed by Vonage. The end goal is to allow users to type their credentials into a cloud service using any device, which will then give them access to a full range of IT services that are paid for and controlled by the organization they work for via a single application.

Not only has compliance been a major BYOD issue, courts have also ruled that organizations are responsible for phone bills that employees incur when using their own devices for the purpose of work. Rather than manage those processes in isolation, Foster says Dell is partnering with Vonage to deliver IT services in the cloud that provide all the flexibility of BYOD without compromising any of the traditional governance capabilities provided by internal IT organizations.

From an end-user perspective, Foster says this means that all business calls can be routed to their personal phone without them ever having to give out their personal phone information. Other benefits include that all the files on those devices are automatically backed up to the cloud.

Foster says that when it comes to enterprise mobility management (EMM), most vendors have completely overlooked the telecommunications side of the BYOD equation. By partnering with Vonage, Foster says Dell is looking to differentiate itself in a crowded EMM market by unifying mobile device and application management with phone services in a way that finally makes sense for both employees and the companies that hired them.