BoxTone®, the company that developed the industry standard for the management, monitoring and support of the BlackBerry platform, today extended its mobile user management solution to manage, track and control iPhone, Palm Pre, Windows Mobile and other ActiveSync-based smartphones.
BoxTone v5.0 enables enterprises, governmental agencies and managed service providers (MSPs) to automatically discover and inventory all enterprise-connected smartphones, track utilization, identify threats and eliminate wasted spend. This comprehensive approach to mobility management is what IT organizations need to maximize the productivity of their cross-platform mobile workforce, while optimizing the balance of service quality, cost and risk.
“With the invasion of employee-owned smartphones running on multiple mobile platforms, organizations are experiencing a new set of mobile management, compliance and cost challenges,” stated Alan Snyder, CEO, BoxTone. “Increasingly, BoxTone’s more than 230 customers worldwide had been asking us to extend our best-in-class BlackBerry platform management solution to accommodate a variety of leading smartphones. Today we responded, with BoxTone v5.0.”
Aberdeen’s September 2009 research report “Mobility Management to Drive Compliance for Employee-Liable Smartphones and Lower TCO” noted that “many IT departments feel compelled to accommodate the influx of employee-liable devices because they must find some way to satisfy the insatiable hunger for mobility among users with organizational mandates to reduce capital expenditures.” While cost savings can be had by shifting device procurement and data plan payment responsibilities from the enterprise to the employee, adding significant numbers of enterprise-enabled smartphones brings unique risks and challenges.
“The more smartphones connect to an enterprise, the higher the risk for lost or stolen sensitive information, and the potential for greater IT support costs,” stated Snyder. “With enterprise-enabled smartphones expected to jump from 10-15 percent today to 70-80 percent by 2012, those risks and costs are set to significantly increase. Enterprises that fail to proactively address this challenge will be run over by the chaos, costs and complexity of mobile diversity.”
BoxTone v5.0 starts by proactively discovering, in real-time, more than 40 critical mobile user data points including smartphone model, smartphone ID, ownership model (employee-liable versus corporate-liable), supporting infrastructure (Mobile Server, Mail Server and wireless carrier), synchronization history and whether a smartphone is BlackBerry Enterprise Server-attached or ActiveSync-attached. 
Armed with full visibility to its enterprise-connected smartphones, the software’s expanded Compliance Management capabilities take over tracking and auditing of all corporate-liable and employee-liable smartphones and user activity. Benefits include the ability to rapidly identify security policy violations or threats – such as rogue or unsecured smartphones – and to confirm devices are wiped before substantial financial loss or regulatory actions ensue or IT credibility is impaired.