With so many more economical choices for purchasing smartphones, more global workers now choose to bring their own device to work.  That’s a double edge sword.  Productivity increases but use of corporate data on employee owned devices translates into increased risk.  What if the employee leaves and goes to a competitor?  What if the phone is broken or lost?  What happens when that employee phone connects employees’ friends, social networks, their media (illicit or virus laden), and games disguising network attacks.  Telecomm is not prepared and IT is overloaded to deal with threats.

With nearly 50% of future phone purchasing moving towards smartphones, employers need a scalable solution to both manage and secure valuable corporate assets.  AT&T executives also detailed this week that 40% of iPhones are now going into the enterprise.  IT and Telecom are converging in their need for intelligent mobile device management that secures these assets while providing both a user and business view into costly bills.  MIT Technology Review writes about Service providers harnessing mobile usage patterns this month as well.

By the end of 2011, a recent study from Nielsen states Smartphone deployments will be so rapid that there will be “more smartphones in the U.S. market than feature phones.”  Smartphones show higher application usage than feature phones even at the basic built-in application level.  During Nielsen’s Mobile Insights survey respondents noted in the last 30 days that users are taking full advantage of device application capabilities.  Apple iPhone OS (32%) and RIM OS (37%) control more than two-thirds of today’s market while Windows Mobile, Android and Symbian account for the remainder.  All OS and device suppliers are increasingly aware of the need for diverse business applications – apps that need to be securely managed at scale.  The smartphone Tsunami is cresting and businesses are now realizing these mobile applications represent a significant increase in corporate data usage on devices never before managed.  The next step for IT is proactive user, application and device management.