'AMAZED AT WHAT YOU FIND'
"Our initial focus was just to see what we had," says Keith Brown, a network administrator at Gwinnett Hospital System of Georgia. With about 5,000 physician associates, Gwinnett got an early start on mobile management, installing a suite from LANDesk in 2004. Before that, Brown says, the hospital system didn't have any visibility into the devices being used until a problem "forced you to go look for them." And then? "You're always amazed at what you find," he says.

Such comments belie the fact that 40% of participants in the InformationWeek survey say they don't see a need to adopt MDM technology. That statistic is almost certainly an artifact, soon to change. Indeed, a majority respond that MDM should be part of wider mobile applications and platforms strategies encompassing BlackBerrys and Windows Mobile. Thirty-eight percent consider MDM extremely important to vendors' mobile-app portfolios.

That latter percentage likely will grow along with the fragmentation transforming the mobile and wireless market today. The iPhone wave, the emergence of Google's Android mobile operating system, the push by Nokia and Symbian deeper into the U.S. enterprise market, the rise of Windows Mobile, and the proliferation of mobile devices from innovative vendors like HTC--all will keep IT managers scrambling to keep up in the next few years.

Security's the foremost factor opening the checkbook for MDM--57% of companies adopting MDM or planning to cite security as the main reason, twice the next factor. When Ami's team inventoried LifeLong's mobile devices earlier this year, she discovered one employee had passed a company-issued phone on to her son. "It wasn't until we threatened to cut off the service that he admitted who he was, and said his mom worked for the organization," she says. For organizations mobilizing proprietary data and applications, a lack of device accountability is a huge security risk.

End-to-end security is paramount, says Samir Bouraoui, director of marketing for HP's mobility solutions group. That strategy must include secure access to corporate networks, data encryption, and the protection of company assets. Some IT directors don't think the risk is manageable at all: "No data should ever reside on remote/mobile devices," insists one survey participant. "EVER."

That's an extreme view. For most companies, managing mobile security will inevitably take up an increasing share of IT departments' time and attention, which includes maintaining and upgrading the devices and the software they run. Many companies are discovering that, while security is a must-have, the real productivity benefits of device management systems lie in the wireless capabilities of the devices themselves, letting IT maintain and update devices remotely.

Old Dominion Freight Line, a less-than-truckload carrier, puts some 3,500 Symbol MC9000 devices in the hands of drivers today, running order tracking and delivery software. The remote-control feature on its Athena MDM system, from Odyssey Software, was the biggest selling point, says Barry Craver, director of freight processing applications at Old Dominion. "The biggest thing we use that for is that it allows us to troubleshoot a potential device issue without having to ship the device back here to headquarters," Craver says.

In general, such secondary cost savings are either underestimated or underappreciated by many IT managers, judging from our survey. Only 28% of IT managers who have deployed or plan to deploy an MDM product say that more efficient mobile spending is a primary reason for doing so. Cost reductions are the main driver for just 6%.

There's a bad-news, good-news aspect to those findings. They indicate that vendors have a long way to go in providing mobile device management software that would-be customers think delivers bottom-line benefits. But there's a big upside for buyers if vendors succeed in doing that.