By James Furbush, News Writer

Code Year, a new initiative to teach people coding, has registered more than 100,000 students in less than a week. That’s double the number of students who enrolled in U.S. computer science undergraduate programs last year, according to Mashable.

Code Year’s success is a clear indication that interest in computer sciences and programming has gone mainstream. It seems like everyone from your kid sister to the college intern your IT department just hired is dabbling in app development. And it’s all thanks to the rise of mobile devices.

Still, the supply of mobile developers isn’t keeping up with the demand from employers, according to the latest monthly IT staffing report from Dice.com, a technology and engineering careers site.

“The biggest reason is, the mobile platforms are so new, there are just not a lot of developers with years and years of experience,” said Alice Hill, managing director with Dice. “At the same time, everyone wants a mobile app. So there’s growing demand and there’s still a small pool.”

Basically, if you’re a mobile developer who can build a quality app and get it through the submission process, that’s the “perfect formula” for landing a good job, Hill said. It sounds easy, but in actuality, few technology professionals have purchasable apps on their CVs. Fewer than one in five have gotten over the submission process hurdle, and only a quarter of tech professionals are even doing mobile development full-time, according to the Dice report.

For most, the newness of mobile app development has relegated it to the hobby or side-project bin. But demand for Android and iPhone developers has risen more than 150% in the past year, according to Dice, and it’s not just hot startups that are looking for mobile app development talent. It’s an “array of industries” and businesses as varied as Major League Baseball, Rhapsody and Capital One, Hill said.

For job-hunting mobile developers, she added, “this is their year.”

Diversify, diversify, diversify! It’s common advice in the investment world, especially when the economy’s not looking so rosy. The theory is, if you hold stakes in lots of different kinds of companies, the failure of one company (or even a whole industry) won’t sink your entire portfolio.

For years, the bulk of Research in Motion’s eggs have been in one basket: BlackBerry smartphones. And it was quite the lucrative basket. But now, thanks to the consumerization of IT, the BlackBerry is losing its grip on the enterprise market. So, naturally, RIM is diversifying.

The company today announced BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, a BlackBerry mobile device management (MDM) service that will also manage iPhones, iPads and Android devices.

Mobile Fusion will allow IT admins to control device-specific functions — such as remote lock and wipe, policy enforcement and application delivery — from one Web-based console, RIM said. The service will rely on BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) for BlackBerry management, and it will use software acquired from ubitexx to manage Apple and Android devices, according to The Verge. A closed beta program will begin in January, with general availability scheduled for late March, RIM said.

There are other multi-platform MDM vendors out there, but RIM is in a unique position to capitalize, thanks to its history in the enterprise and existing relationships with BES customers. (That’s if Mobile Fusion can manage iOS and Android as well as BES can manage BlackBerry — which, given most vendors’ history managing other vendors’ stuff, is a big “if.”)

The bigger issue, however, is what this news means for RIM’s core business, enterprise smartphones. RIM isn’t explicitly admitting defeat, but the company knows it’s in trouble. In the press release, RIM said it developed Mobile Fusion in response to “an increase in the diversity of mobile devices in use in the enterprise,” which is the nice way of saying “Apple and Google stealing our market share left and right.”

In light of this admission, diversification is the right move for RIM. But given the company’s recent troubles, it may not be enough.

The HTC Droid Incredible Android 2.3 update is screwing up a lot of people’s phones.

Droid Incredible users (myself included) finally received Android 2.3 — which came out last year, by the way — on Monday night. After updating, many users (again, myself included) began receiving “low storage space” notifications, and the apparent low storage was preventing access to certain apps, such as Gmail and Google Talk. I say “apparent low storage” because most users in fact had plenty of space available; mine was around 80% free when I checked.

Then, last night, another OS update became available. For some lucky people (me), this update apparently fixed the issue. For others (my girlfriend), it didn’t. And there are even reports from users who have such low storage space that they can’t even install the update that may or may not fix the low storage space problem.

There’s been no word from Verizon Wireless or HTC or Google on what the cause of the problem is or when affected customers can expect a real fix.

The problem speaks to a bigger issue with Android, and that is OS fragmentation. It’s ridiculous that Incredible users had to wait a year for Android 2.3, which is a rather underwhelming OS upgrade to begin with. Wow, my notification bar now says “3G” in a super-cool, futuristic font and my default ringtone is now in a higher pitch! Thanks, guys, this is so totally worth ruining my phone over!

But this is what happens when OS updates are left in the hands of carriers and manufacturers. They become an afterthought. I already bought the phone from HTC, and I’m already locked in to a Verizon contract. These companies gain nothing by updating my operating system. They make their money on the new customers who buy the new devices with the new OSes.

The problem for Android is, when my contract is up and I’m one of those potential new customers, my new device might be an iPhone.

By Julia Anderson and Colin Steele, Editors

Apple sold more than 4 million iPhone 4S devices in the three days after its launch, the company reported. AT&T and Sprint also reported record sales on the first day their customers could purchase the iPhone 4S in stores.

More than 25 million devices are now running iOS 5, the latest iPhone, iPod touch and iPad operating system, Apple said. In addition, more than 20 million people have signed up for iCloud, Apple’s new cloud storage service. Both iOS 5 and iCloud debuted just last week.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich debuts

With Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, Google is unifying its smartphone and tablet operating systems.

The current smartphone-specific OS is Android 2.3 Gingerbread, and the tablet OS is Android 3.0 Honeycomb. But Android 4.0 is designed to run on both kinds of devices, which should quiet some of the complaints about Android device fragmentation.

Ice Cream Sandwich features a new user interface, with separate home screen tabs for apps and widgets. There’s also improved management of notifications and application-level controls over data usage. And for business users, the OS offers new security and VPN APIs.

Google and Samsung showed off Android 4.0 at a media event in Hong Kong this week. The OS is expected to be available on devices next month.

RIM launches BBX, immediately sued

BBX, the next-generation operating system for BlackBerry smartphones and tablets, debuted at this week’s BlackBerry DevCon Americas conference.

BBX combines the traditional BlackBerry OS with QNX, an operating system Research in Motion (RIM) acquired last year. RIM was short on details about BBX, but the company did say the OS would make it easier to develop richer, more interactive “super apps” for BlackBerry devices.

Talk about potential BBX features was short-lived, however, because the day after the launch, a software company called BASIS filed legal action against RIM over the BBX name. It turns out BASIS has its own operating system called BBx, and RIM’s announcement caused “great confusion” for BASIS users, the company said.

The lukewarm reception to BBX, last week’s BlackBerry outage and the continued success of iOS and Android devices have at least one blogger wondering whether RIM should give up on BlackBerry entirely.

Motorola, Verizon unveil Droid RAZR

The new Droid RAZR will be the world’s thinnest LTE-capable smartphone, Motorola and Verizon Wireless said this week.

Despite its 7.1mm waist line, the latest in Motorola’s line of Android smartphones has a similar look to other Droid models. But it boasts a Kevlar fiber casing designed to “withstand the back-pocket test,” Motorola said.

The Droid RAZR runs Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and supports Verizon’s 4G LTE network. Motorola has also included support for its MotoCast application, which streams content between PCs and mobile devices. Business users will have access to corporate email, the ability to view and edit Word documents, and Citrix Receiver for remote application access.

Pre-orders for the Droid RAZR start Oct. 27, and it’s scheduled to be available in stores in November.

Photo (cc) by Denise Cross and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

As the bring-your-own device phenomenon grows, so do the options for separating personal and business communications on the same device.

Desktop virtualization delivers self-contained business operating systems and applications to smartphones and tablets. Technologies such as VMware’s Mobile Virtualization Platform and AT&T’s Toggle let users essentially keep two phones — one for business use, one for personal use — on the same device. And with a new release from ShoreTel, employees can securely tap into their companies’ unified communications (UC) systems from their mobile devices.

“We’re starting to see a lot of interest in companies that want to make the mobile device the primary method of communication,” said analyst Irwin Lazar, a vice president at Nemertes Research.

ShoreTel focuses on mobile unified communications

Announced this week, the latest version of ShoreTel Mobility aims to provide user-friendly mobile unified communications access. An employee downloads an app, which integrates with his or her phone’s existing dialer and contact list, and IT then provisions that device for access to the UC system.

When the employee calls a personal contact, the phone makes the call as usual. But when the employee calls a business contact, ShoreTel Mobility kicks in — automatically connecting to the VPN if outside the corporate firewall — and the user has access to the company’s full UC features.

“It makes it a lot easier to use,” Lazar said. “From a user perspective, it’s just like any other app.”

As with any bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiative, device support is a major factor in whether a new project will succeed or not. ShoreTel Mobility supports 12 Android devices running version 2.1 or higher, Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, plus the latest BlackBerry OS 6 devices.

“Most of our customers used to be focused on the BlackBerry … and as Android and iPhone got more popular, this whole bring-your-own-device phenomenon got its legs and took off,” said Pejman Roshan, ShoreTel’s vice president of mobility.

ShoreTel Mobility also connects to all leading PBX systems in addition to ShoreTel’s, including those from Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks and Microsoft.

“A lot of [other vendors] have a fairly limited number of mobile devices that they’ll support, and it brings it back into their own portfolio,” said Frank Stinson, partner and senior analyst with Intellicom Analytics. “It’s not supporting the bring-your-own-device thing as well as [ShoreTel].”

The ShoreTel Mobility app does not store any data locally on users’ devices, so IT admins can de-provision employees without wiping out the personal data on their phones — a common complaint among users.

“They can containerize the app, knock out the app, put a poison pill in the app, whatever you want to call it, and not take out the whole device,” Roshan said.

Mobile and desktop virtualization options

ShoreTel Mobility is focused on keeping personal and business phone calls separate, but other approaches pay more attention to data and apps.

VMware and Verizon Wireless will announce this week they are partnering to offer personal and business segregation on smartphones, according to IDG News Service. They will presumably use VMware’s Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP), a smartphone hypervisor that allows multiple operating systems to run on the same device — in effect creating isolated environments that users can switch between based on the tasks they need to perform.

Also this week, AT&T announced Toggle, a similar feature based on technology from Enterproid, whose Divide platform lets users create secure enterprise profiles to access on their personal smartphones.

A major problem with VMware MVP and AT&T Toggle is that, as of now, they only run on Android devices, said Mike Sapien, principal analyst with Ovum.

“Multiple platforms, multiple operating systems, multiple devices is a lot more friendly for the users,” he said.

Their go-to-market strategies may also cause issues for IT admins, who are looking to make their jobs easier, not harder, Stinson said.

“ShoreTel’s selling to the enterprise and providing an architecture to support users’ existing devices,” he said. “The carriers are coming at it from the other angle. If they’re contracting with the user, that’s kind of an administrative hassle for the enterprise.”

Desktop virtualization technologies aren’t an ideal solution, either. Reliance on connectivity and the performance of Windows OSes and apps on mobile devices are still obstacles for many organizations. As Bob Egan, managing director of MGI Research, put it at last week’s Interop conference, “Virtualization is a mess right now. … The company that figures out media support and application and OS neutrality is going to be a big company.”

Photo (cc) by Trace Meek and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

A massive BlackBerry outage has left users with limited email and messaging services for much of this week.

The BlackBerry outage began Monday for users in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and it spread to North America on Wednesday. Research in Motion (RIM) has blamed the BlackBerry outage on the failure of one of its core networking switches — and the subsequent failure of its backup system.

The BlackBerry outage comes at a terrible time for RIM. Once the only game in town for mobile email, its market share is eroding as consumer devices running Apple iOS and Google Android take hold. RIM still offers the strongest enterprise management capabilities, but that matters less and less, thanks to the consumerization of IT. And its enterprise reputation will definitely take a hit with this extended BlackBerry outage.

Late Wednesday night, RIM said service levels were improving. And today, co-CEO Mike Lazaridis posted this message on YouTube:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/zQ1esvGae_s" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Apple iOS 5 released

The latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 5, hit iTunes on Thursday. The release brings more than 200 new features to the iPhone and iPad, including a drop-down notifications menu, better camera options and Twitter integration that’s laid on real thick.

With iOS 5, Apple is also moving beyond mobile devices into another consumerization area: cloud storage. The new iCloud service stores music, videos, photos and documents and makes them available across your iOS devices, Macs and even PCs. Hey, speaking of cloud storage…

Box.net targets businesses

Cloud storage and collaboration service Box.net has raised $81 million in its latest round of funding, designed to help boost its enterprise offerings.

Box.net and similar services, such as Dropbox, have grown in popularity among people who want to store and access their data and documents — both personal and business — from any device. But this Wild West approach has businesses concerned about security, and now the major IT vendors are swooping in.

Microsoft (Windows Live SkyDrive), Apple (iCloud) and VMware (Project Octopus) are all entering the cloud storage market to address enterprise needs. Box.net, for one, is not backing down.

“Businesses of all sizes are moving their information and collaboration to the cloud, and with this new capital we’ll support their transition by continuing to aggressively out-innovate legacy players like Microsoft,” co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie said in a press release.

Box.net also turned down a $600 million acquisition offer from Citrix Systems earlier this year, according to Forbes. And to combat this week’s debut of iCloud, the company is giving away 50 GB of storage to all iOS users.

NEW YORK — There’s room for a third vendor to succeed alongside Apple and Google in the mobile OS market. Who that vendor will be — Microsoft or RIM — is up for debate.

Analysts discussed the future of the market during an Interop session this morning. Research in Motion (RIM) has dominated in the business world with its BlackBerry smartphones, but its long-term outlook isn’t so rosy, thanks to employees buying iPhones, iPads and Android devices and using them for work.

Even if RIM as a company doesn’t survive this shift, the BlackBerry will still maintain a strong enterprise presence, said Rohit Mehra, director of enterprise communications infrastructure for IDC.

“BlackBerry’s going to be around, in terms of the install base, for a long time,” he said. “Things don’t change that fast in our industry.”

But Mark Lowenstein, managing director of Mobile Ecosystem, said Microsoft is in a better position, thanks to Windows’ huge install base among business users.

“It’s going to be very interesting to see what Microsoft does in this space over the next year,” he said. “They already have multiple hooks in the enterprise.”

Andrew Borg, senior research analyst with the Aberdeen Group, called Microsoft a “force to be reckoned with” because of its Windows Phone OS. The latest version, Mango, features a unique design that will set Microsoft smartphones apart, Borg said.

“They are not imitating iOS,” he said. “There are many that think that Android is a clone of iOS. You can’t argue that with Microsoft.”

Managing heterogeneous environments is a huge pain.

That’s one of the major lessons I learned over three years of covering the virtualization market. Lots of vendors say they can manage mixed infrastructures, but they all have shortcomings. The platform vendors have limited features for managing competing platforms. The small ISVs do a few specific things well, but they don’t do everything. And the big systems management tools can be costly and complicated.

Desktop admins haven’t really had to worry about this problem. Most shops run Windows exclusively, using well-established, Windows-specific tools for management. But that’s all changing.

You may have noticed that Windows PCs aren’t the only enterprise endpoints anymore. These cool little gadgets called smartphones and tablets are infiltrating the workplace. Lots of them. Made by different vendors. Running different OSes. With different levels of security. And if you think you can pick just one to support, you better think again.

That’s according to a recent Forrester Research report, “Ten Lessons Learned From Early Adopters of Mobile Device Management Solutions.” In the report, Forrester analysts warn, “The years of limiting device choice to a single platform are over.”

Does that mean you have to support every device under the sun? No. Just because Kevin the new sales rep thought he was getting a good deal on a BlackBerry PlayBook at Best Buy, you shouldn’t have to bend over backwards to accommodate him.

Forrester recommends focusing on iPhones, iPads and Android devices, which are the most popular among users and mobile device management (MDM) vendors alike. But you’ll still face plenty of challenges, even with this narrow scope, because today’s MDM tools “have limited management functionality,” and “many IT managers still have concerns about the lack of full-disk encryption and more advanced application control,” Forrester says.

With all of these issues, the temptation is strong to just avoid supporting these devices altogether. But that won’t stop employees from using them. And without at least some controls in place, your organization’s security could be at risk. Any way you slice it, the consumerization of IT is bringing the pain of mixed-infrastructure management to endpoint admins.