You've probably struggled with the inherent challenges associated with managing a mobile workforce. Do your mobile users complain that email is failing to reach their phones? Are they experiencing calendar-reconciliation problems? Do new phones have trouble establishing network connectivity? You have plenty of management policies in place for your servers and desktops, but what about those Research in Motion (RIM) BlackBerry, Apple iPhone, and Windows Mobile smart phones? They're proliferating at a wild clip, so how do you rein them in?
"Increasingly, we're seeing a 'consumeration' of the enterprise," Zenprise's Ahmed Datoo, VP of marketing, told me when I spoke to him earlier this month. "And at the same time, today's economy is creating flat-budget IT departments that don't know how to tackle smart-phone growth."
Zenprise's answer is to automate smart-phone management, and it does so with its MobileManager platform, to which the company has recently added support for Windows Mobile devices. This support is in addition to the monitoring and troubleshooting that MobileManager already performs for enterprise BlackBerry and iPhone deployments. The ability to manage multiple mobile platforms is especially crucial, according to Zenprise, because The Radicati Group predicts there will be 600 million smartphones in the enterprise by 2011.
Through its use of automation, Zenprise MobileManager introduces a best-practices approach to finding and fixing user problems. Just as data-center automation introduced a new level of efficiency into provisioning and managing heterogeneous servers, automating mobile service management delivers a cost-effective way to support and manage complex, heterogeneous smartphone environments. This approach lowers mean time to repair, standardizes problem resolution, minimizes support calls, and improves overall productivity.
"Think of the TV show House," said Datoo. "You've got a bunch of smart doctors trying to diagnose illnesses. They go through initial tests and then secondary tests, all the while narrowing down to a smart diagnosis. That's what we're doing in MobileManager: We've automated 6500 troubleshooting processes so that kind of smart diagnostics and repair can happen behind the scenes. And that kind of service is unique in the mobile space."
Pricing begins at $35 per user for 1000 users. Supported platforms include BlackBerry, iPhone, and now Windows Mobile. To learn more about Zenprise proactive troubleshooting for Windows Mobile environments, visit the Zenprise website