Mobile Device Management Corrals Smartphone Problems

This all begs the question of why, with standards in place, carriers can’t just do their own device management and skip the middleman vendor. The answer is as simple as a cottage industry. Somebody has to tell the standards how to work and somebody has to interface with existing back office operations to get the benefits of the program.

“We sell a software solution to mobile operators ... that sits on their network. Ideally most of it is automated (and) when an event happens that’s caught by our solution and that creates a response. This is the use case where we’re automatically interacting with a subscriber as something has occurred on the network,” Dalgety said.

Automatic response would generally fall into the range of a new device powering on and joining the network and being automatically authorized.

“All the services that an operator wants to use ... messaging or Internet access or browsing ... it may well be that once we’ve detected a new device or issue on a new device we have to tell those elements to update because there’s a new user in there,” Dalgety said.

This frequently leads to the second part of the Mformation process: customer care.

“The CSR can interact with the device via a device management session, bring back that information into a console they’re working with to help diagnose the issue and resolve it,” said Dalgety.

Mformation’s software sits in the operator network, has access to the service delivery platform and is placed within the customer care solution.

InnoPath offers the same opportunities to activate and troubleshoot smart devices and help you fix a cell phone remotely. “In the past we’ve done this with handset manufacturers where we build part of our client into their handset and work with their server and push firmware updates over the air,” Yong said. “More recently we’re working on a solution that allows operators to proactively troubleshoot devices in the field that are already deployed by using an InnoPath client or a standardized OMA-DM client that could be from anybody else and using our server.”

In each case, having the correct software in the end devices is only half the game; the other half occurs in the operator’s back office where new configuration and troubleshooting software must be installed and deployed.

“For a brand new operator that has never deployed an MDM solution before, the solution can probably be integrated in about three months to six months time,” said Yong. “It’s based on a Sun server – nothing new for most operators – and then it’s just mostly a software solution that sits in their data center.”

Operators using InnoPath also can customize their operations so, as devices become more complex, frontline CSRs can answer some of the questions previously reserved for higher level technical support simply by gaining visibility into the phones. In the past, a representation of each device and all its features and screens were loaded into the system which the CSR could use to walk the consumer through the configurations. Until, of course, none of that worked and it was back to the store for the consumer and the phone.