MobileIron announces Managed Service Provider for Smartphone DM

As you may have heard, Enterprise Mobile announced the availability of a Hosted Device Management solution for iPhone and other mobile platforms.

It is powered by technology from MobileIron, a partner that we have been working with very closely for a while now. I am personally excited about this for several reasons:

* Hosted DM is faster to implement – no design reviews, no security committees for our customers to deal with.
* It can be scaled up and down very quickly – if you are hiring 1333 merchandisers for a holiday season, no problem – you only get charged for the 2 months they are employed.
* No ramp up for a company’s IT staff is required.
* Coupled with our other services, it enables a full mobile deployment instantly.

I could go on to say why this is sexy. I could call it cloud computing, SaaS, the ASP model, hosting, outsourcing or any of the other labels that trendy now. The descriptors aren’t as important as the capabilities that hosted device management provides. Of course, we all know that beyond the benefits I mentioned there are challenges with a hosted model that should be considered. User/authentication can be more complex as the identity of users either has to be replicated or re-created with the hosting provider, and some services may be limited in terms of integrating into an existing on-premise infrastructure.

However, I do believe that when you combine our services and capabilities you get more benefits than pitfalls with the hosted model. Of course, if you don’t share that view, you can take advantage of the installation and services on premise. That way you can enjoy looking at the silver appliance in your data center and Enterprise Mobile takes care of all the support, ongoing management, provisioning or even end user support for you. Give us a call…

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Symbian switches to open source

Symbian phone operating system goes open source

The group behind the world's most popular smartphone operating system - Symbian - is giving away "billions of dollars" worth of code for free.

The Symbian Foundation's announced that it would make its code open source in 2008 and has now completed the move.

It means that any organisation or individual can now use and modify the platform's underlying source code "for any purpose".

Symbian has shipped in more than 330m mobile phones, the foundation says.
It believes the move will attract new developers to work on the system and help speed up the pace of improvements.

"This is the largest open source migration effort ever," Lee Williams of the Symbian Foundation told BBC News.

"It will increase rate of evolution and increase the rate of innovation of the platform."

Ian Fogg, principal analyst at Forrester research, said the move was about Symbian "transitioning from one business model to another" as well as trying to gain "momentum and mindshare" for software that had been overshadowed by the release of Apple's iPhone and Google Android operating system.

Evolutionary barrier
Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia bought the software in 2008 and helped establish the non-profit Symbian Foundation to oversee its development and transition to open source.

The foundation includes Nokia, AT&T, LG, Motorola, NTT Docomo, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone.

The group has now released what it calls the Symbian platform as open source code. This platform unites different elements of the Symbian operating system as well as components - in particular, user interfaces - developed by individual members.
Until now, Symbian's source code was only open to members of the organisation.
It can be downloaded from the foundation's website from 1400 GMT.

Mr Williams said that one of the motivations for the move was to speed up the rate at which the 10-year-old platform evolved.

"When we chatted to companies who develop third party applications, we found people would spend up to nine months just trying to navigate the intellectual property," he said.

"That was really hindering the rate of progress."

Opening up the platform would also improve security, he added.

'Mind share'
Symbian development is currently dominated by Nokia, but the foundation hoped to reduce the firm's input to "no more than 50%" by the middle of 2011, said Mr Williams.

"We will see a dramatic shift in terms of who is contributing to the platform."
However, said Mr Williams, the foundation would monitor phones using the platform to ensure that they met with minimum standards.

Despite being the world's most popular smart phone operating system, Symbian has been losing the publicity battle, with Google's Android operating system and Apple's iPhone dominating recent headlines.
"Symbian desperately needs to regain mindshare at the moment," said Mr Fogg.

"It's useful for them to say Symbian is now open - Google has done very well out of that."
He also said that the software "may not be as open and free as an outsider might think".
"Almost all of the open source operating systems on mobile phones - Nokia's Maemo, Google's Android - typically have proprietary software in them."

For example, Android incorporates Google's e-mail system Gmail.
But Mr Williams denied the move to open source was a marketing move.

"The ideas we are executing ideas came 12-18 months before Android and before the launch of the original iPhone,".