Mobile Device Management Corrals Smartphone Problems

The irony of smartphones is that the devices are getting smarter than the people who buy and want to use them. This creates a problem for mobile carriers who want to reap the rewards and added revenue from advanced services built into smartphones but don’t want to pay to educate customers – sometimes for hours on end – on how to work the devices.

It’s also a problem for providers who, in the not-too-distant past, could sell a user a flip phone where the most complex problem might be whether the screen resolution was high or low, black-and-white or color and what ringtones could be loaded. Smartphones offer e-mail, Web browsing, video, audio, cameras, messaging, games and a plethora of other applications that, for consumers, are like finding gold nuggets in a dark mine and for carriers like cashing those gold nuggets at the assayer’s office.

Since consumers aren’t miners and Web access isn’t gold, “all of a sudden you have somebody on the phone with a customer care rep for 30 minutes trying to figure out why they can’t get e-mail or what things aren’t working right,” said Nancee Ruzicka, OSS/BSS global competitive strategies analyst for Stratecast.

In this pressed-for-time, attention-deficit society, no one reads instructions let alone works with difficult thumb-controlled configurations. It’s easier to let your fingers do the walking and call the carrier who, of course, is not delighted to hear from someone who’s already listed as an asset on the annual revenue report.

Fixing or even setting up a mobile phone can eat up the profits that come from offering the new range of services and applications on smartphones, so somebody had to step in and do something about it. Mobile Device Management (MDM), a surprisingly standardized service, provides a way for a carrier to look out all the way to the handset and quickly resolve problems by actually taking control of the device and working things out. MDM has been embraced by device manufacturers who are pre-loading the standardized clients into their devices. It also is being embraced by carriers who are loading the necessary software within their OSS/BSS to interface with those clients.

“The cool thing about mobile device management is that the standards are actually keeping up,” Ruzicka said. “You have proprietary [operating systems] but you don’t have all these proprietary implementations of the management platform.”

Two companies have emerged to answer the need: Mformation and InnoPath.

“They’re having success; it’s definitely a need that they’re filling,” Ruzicka said.

Standards make things a little more interesting for vendors and a lot less interesting for carriers and phone makers who don’t have to worry about multiple ways of doing the same things.

“We’ve always been able to look into the device in some ways because it’s all based on an OMA-DM (Open Mobile Alliance-Device Management) standard protocol. That [standard] probably wasn’t as mature and as widely deployed until probably this year [and] that’s partly why we can leverage this solution a little more,” said Anna Yong, senior product marketing manager at InnoPath.

The standard’s maturation coincided nicely with the overload of smartphones hitting the market. That, in turn, allowed smartphone makers to build standardized device management into their devices. “[So] it’s pre-loaded with a range of programs where ... we can install our server to interoperate with the client on that device, interact with the device, bring in information, update information or whatever the key task is,” said Rob Dalgety, marketing director for Mformation.