Managing mobile devices, the easy way

posted by Johnny Waterschoot on February 14, 2008

Imagine losing your mobile phone. There goes your data. Imagine having your business smartphone stolen. There goes all your confidential data. So what do you do? Buy a new phone of course, but what about all the data you had in the old one like numbers, agenda, notes, pictures? What about the confidential information if it was your business smartphone? We all know that it is hard enough for people to even bother to backup their computers, let alone their phones. So is it all lost?

Not necessarily, thanks to MDM, which stands for Mobile Device Management, a service that more and more operators are offering as a key differentiator. MDM is a broad term, encompassing services like distribution of applications and settings to your mobile device OTA (Over The Air). Examples of these services are updating it to the latest firmware, but also backing it up (automatically), or sending pictures to a secure storage when your phone memory is full. It even allows you to “brick” (i.e. totally lock up) your phone in case it gets stolen.

With ever increasing complexity in handsets and broadband networks like WiMAX, operators need a way to make sure their customer’s handsets have the right firmware, the right settings etc. MDM can help them with customer service, reduce churn, lower support costs, and increase adoption of new services an ever more complicated mobile devices. At the congress I came across a couple of companies that we invested in that do just this: mformation and InnoPath. A compatible service seems to be MobiComp that allows you to backup, restore and share the data on your phone.

Update When walking the floor, I came across one more of our portfolio companies, LogMeIn, that offfer a support software to manage smartphones over the air.

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tagged: FOTA, Intel, MDM, mobile, Mobile World Congress, OTA, waterschoot, wireless, wmc