COVER STORY

B Y S U S A N N U N Z I ATA & J E F F G O L D M A N

We d e s c r i b e Northeastern as a n y t i m e, a n y p l a c e, any device.

anyplace, any device," says Mickool. "We've

I T E X E C U T I V E S AT L E A D I N G E N T E R P R I S E S A R E F I N D I N G A VA R I E T Y O F WAY S T O A D D R E S S T H E CHALLENGE OF SUPPORTING MOBILE USERS.

There are few mobile environments more heterogeneous than the campus of a higher education institution. Just ask Rick Mickool, Executive Director / CTO IS at Boston's Northeastern University. The school, which encompasses six different campuses, has a student body of 26,000-28,000. Students enter with a wide array of wireless smartphones, notebooks and netbooks. In addition, faculty and staff primarily use BlackBerry smartphones through Microsoft Exchange servers, although here, too, iPhones, Windows Mobile, and Palm devices are starting to crop up, says Mickool. "We describe Northeastern as anytime,

said, 'ok this is reality, so how can we leverage the fact that students will be buying these things we can't lock down?' That has shaped our strategy." Such a strategy is rapidly becoming reality for IT executives at enterprises across all verticals, as the floodgates open to a diverse array of mobile and wireless devices (See sidebar, page 15). There are myriad options for managing mobility in the enterprise. Most mobile enterprise application platform, including Sybase, Antenna, Syclo, Spring Wireless and

MobileEnterpriseMag.com

Pyxis Mobile, among others, offer mobility management components to their solutions. In addition, there are a number of vendors that specialize in mobility management, including BoxTone, Conceivium, Zenprise, MobileIron, Visage Mobile, Odyssey Software, Trellia, and Wavelink, to name just a few. Mickool was challenged with developing applications that could serve students and faculty and be accessible on a wide array of devices. "We were already starting to see and hear of different departments on campus hiring their own consultants to write an iPhone app," he says. "If you don't get ahead of that, you have a problem at highest university level, where there are 20 different Northeastern apps out there on iTunes." An added factor is that departments were contracting to get apps written without planning for a second generation, or how to support the apps. "We wanted to make sure we were able to provide a mechanism for departments to get this stuff developed and supported with a long term strategy in mind." After a pilot with 60 students involving

W H AT W I L L I M P R O V E I T SUPPORT OF MOBILE USERS?

(% RESPONDENTS)

distribution company with 27 production lines in nine plants across six states. Headquartered in Houston, TX, the company provides food services to restaurant and industrial accounts,

Better control over security of information on device More control to optimize service quality Management tools to accomodate multiple device platforms More visibility into applications and data Formalized procedures for mobile support Less support of mobile users

33

as well as the consumer market. The company has more than 100 smartphones deployed, and initially chose to

21 19 15 6 6

standardize on Windows Mobile devices, says Stephan Henze, VP of IT. While Windows mobile management tools addressed such factors as setting enterprise policies, Henze says he needed a solution that could address the entire lifecycle of mobile devices in his enterprise, from procurement, configuration and security through ongoing user management and support.

Note: First-choice ranking shown. Base: 67 U.S. and U.K. mobility decision makers. Source: Forrester Research, Commissioned survey conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalk of BoxTone, October 2009

admissions applications to educational services to alumni development. "Pyxis [Mobile] allows you to integrate [mobility] to many systems behind the scenes," says Mickool. For Northeastern, these include online educational tool Blackboard, Microsoft SQL databases, Oracle, and Salesforce.com.

In February 2009 the company began testing MobileIron, and deployed it enterprise wide three months later. "Any phone needs to be authorized before it connects," says Henze. "[MobileIron] has remote wiping capabilities, we can retire phones and we can apply policies so users are only authorized to install certain applications." For troubleshooting, Henze says, "MobileIron gives us the ability to see the

L i fe c y c l e S u p p o r t
Even those IT executives who are tasked with supporting a relatively homogenous

netbooks and iPod Touch devices that started mobile environment -- for example a large in summer 2009, Mickool is rolling out Pyxis field force deployment standardized on Mobile as the platform of choice for the Windows Mobile devices -- are seeking to university. "With the Pyxis [Mobile] platform, improve the way they manage mobility for we can create role workflows. We can create their employees. one application and, depending on how the Windsor Foods is a manufacturing and person is identified [as a faculty member or student] we can give them access to specific mobile services." In addition, the solution enables Mickool's team to perform mass application updates. "We can add, delete or modify applications without users having to do anything. The next time they log in they see the service." Mobile and wireless tools offered at Northeastern will incorporate everything from
>> Kirk Mihalkovitz, IT Operations Manager, Windsor Foods uses two screens of Mobile Iron to monitor and manage mobile devices used by 100 employees nationwide.

phone's screen, remotely control it and see, in real time, the configuration on that phone, how much memory is there, how much data are stored, and which data are stored." The next step is to lessen the user burden on IT, notes Henze. "[MobileIron] are putting

MARCH/APRIL 2010

MOBILE ENTERPRISE

a portal in place where the cellphone user signs on so they can see their calls, their SMSs, can wipe the device themselves, they can locate their own phone if they lose it, we can publish apps and the users can drag and drop the apps. They are also working to integrate filesharing.

down, or wondering what was going on in the environment -- and from an IT perspective, that's not very good," Daley says. What's more, Daley says, they often still had trouble determining the cause of the problem. "We would have to scramble to find out what was going on, then eventually understand what the issue was, and then try to resolve the issue -- and then bring the service back online," he says.

BES server doesn't have access to your email file,'" he says. Rob Holloway, director of information technology at the law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, faced a similar range of challenges before he implemented BoxTone's management solution. With a deployment of 900 BlackBerry devices, Holloway says, "We were reactive -- we had to wait for people to call in with issues." Holloway says BoxTone has transformed the way his team deals with issues. "In some cases, second-level guys can take a look at the BlackBerry environment and see if there are issues cropping up. It allows us to be a lot more proactive in dealing with issues: if people call us, we are ahead of them," he says. And justifying the cost of the BoxTone implementation, Holloway says, was simple. "[We] were not able to be proactive, we were constantly swapping out devices and incurring costs for devices that were dormant. It was pretty easy to justify that we needed this kind of management tool in place," he says. //

M a n ag i n g B l a c k B e r r y s
Even ensuring the health of a homogenous BlackBerry deployment can be an ongoing

Thanks to Conceivium's tight integration challenge. For many companies, a mobile with the BlackBerry log files, Daley says he's management solution such as those available able to stay on top of issues as they come up. from Conceivium, BoxTone, Zenprise and "There are a number of times that we've been others can make the difference between called about an issue with our BES server, and handling issues proactively and simply we can respond, 'Not a problem -- we're aware waiting until users call in with problems. of it -- it will be back in five minutes,'" he Faced with the challenge of managing a says. global deployment of approximately 30,000 Device activation is another common BlackBerry smartphones, Dawson Daley, source of issues, Daley says. "With wireless IT architect for IBM Canada, settled Conceivium, we're able to track the full on Conceivium's mobile infrastructure and activation process, so our tech teams can say, device management solution. 'Here's the problem: your carrier didn't set up "We were getting calls from our execuyour account for BlackBerry services,' or 'You tives telling us that their BES server was didn't enter the password correctly,' or 'The

M O B I L E A P P L I C AT I O N D E P L O Y O M E N T / E X P A N S I O N PLANS, NEXT 12 MONTHS (% RESPONDENTS)

Mobile printing Location-based Asset management Customer-facing Logistics Field service Sales force Inventory management Emergency response Personalized contacts/calendar Wireless email
Expland/upgrade existing implementation

1 9 3 4 2 6 4 5 6 3 5 12 23 11 4 15 15 14 16 18 22 20

15 18 5 8 3 5 5 5 6 18 19 18 19 18 51 59
Piloting

I t wa s p r e t t y e a s y to j u s t i f y t h at we n e e d e d t h i s t y p e o f m a n age m e n t to o l .
P E R C E N TA G E O F E M P L O Y E E S WHO WORK OUTSIDE THE OFFICE EACH WEEK
Work in the eld more than half the time (o the road, at a client site, etc.) Travel away from the oce on average one day per week (but not working at home)

23 22

32

30

12 3 6
Interested/ Considering

Telecommute from home at least one day per week

26
Telecommute from home at least four days per week

Implementing /implemented

10

Base: 450 mobility decision-makers at North American and European enterprises Source: Forrester Research, Enterprises And SMB Networks and Telecommunications Survey, North America And Europe, Q1 2009.

Base: 1,038 North American and U.K. enterprises. Source: Forrester Research, Business Data Services (BDS) Q3 2009 Enterprise Hardware Survey.