LAS VEGAS — Two new Samsung devices, the Galaxy Note and the Galaxy Tab 7.7, will offer security and management enhancements for business users.

The devices, announced this week at the International Consumer Electronics Show, are the first to carry the Samsung Approved for Enterprise (SAFE) tag. SAFE devices target the growing number of consumers using personal smartphones and tablets at work and the challenges IT faces in securing and managing these devices, Samsung said.

All SAFE devices will offer on-device, 256-bit encryption and integrate with leading mobile device management and VPN products, the company said. They’ll also have Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync support.

The Galaxy Tab 7.7 is an ultra-thin Android 3.2 tablet that will run on Verizon Wireless’ network. The Galaxy Note is a 5.3-inch Android 2.3 smartphone — sorry, no Ice Cream Sandwich here — that blurs the lines between phones and tablets. It will run on on AT&T.

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.

By Bridget Botelho, Senior Site Editor

AUSTIN, Texas — A session here at Dell World on the convergence of endpoint devices turned out to be a support group for administrators dealing with the consumerization of IT and bring-your-own-device policies.

About 100 IT folks weighed the pros and cons of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies and shared their experiences of begrudgingly supporting personal smartphones, iPads and other tablets in addition to corporate-owned PCs.

Part of the problem is that the BYOD concept goes against the ideals of platform standardization in corporations. Tablets are convenient, but they have limitations, so end users can’t ditch their PCs entirely.

“Users can’t use their iPad to run AutoCAD, but they don’t care,” one attendee said. “They still want one. All we can do is be flexible and suggest specs and configurations, but we see the gamut of devices anyway.”

That sense of defeat was palpable in the room. Administrators know that the consumerization of IT is happening, with or without their support.

“You have to support them, because end users are circumventing IT in ways you wouldn’t believe,” another attendee said.

In companies that do let employees use their tablets for work, IT ends up managing multiple platforms per end user, which is obviously not a popular concept among time-strapped administrators.

“We have all of these employees who want iPads, and if we let them use those devices, we end up supporting all these different browsers and applications and wireless environments,” one attendee griped. “These are the same employees who don’t even know what a wireless connection is.”

Other attendees shared stories of end users who they said are too clueless to take responsibility for their own devices — particularly when running corporate applications on them. Many end users don’t know how to ensure a connection is secure, for instance.

One answer to that problem is desktop virtualization, which lets IT remotely deliver a corporate desktop image and also kill that image if a device is stolen, compromised or infected by a virus.

There are plenty of IT shops that support BYOD using desktop virtualization, particularly in higher education, where students bring their own Macs, iPads and Android devices and expect to access university apps and data on those devices anytime, from anywhere.

The corporate world uses that approach as well. One session attendee said her employer gives each employee a $1,200 stipend every three years to buy devices and support from the vendor of his or her choice, so that the company IT department does not have to support those devices. Administrators simply deliver virtual desktops to end users and manage the desktop image on the back end.

Whether that approach to BYOD saves companies money depends, because large companies get client devices at a corporate discount. Desktop virtualization isn’t exactly cheap, either, and there are also some performance limitations with remote desktops that vendors still have to overcome.

But the multi-device movement is happening with or without IT support, so it’s a good idea to investigate some BYOD options. As Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell Services, said this week, IT has little choice but to embrace the notion of consumerization.

“The always-on, always-available infrastructure is bringing itself to bear in the commercial space,” he said. “CIOs can either fend it off or embrace it and support the availability everywhere, anytime. … It’s innovate or die.”

NEW YORK — Some interesting tidbits picked up while covering the consumerization of IT at Interop this week:

• From Chris Hazelton, research director with the 451 Group: It took 20 years to sell the first 100 million PCs. It took six years to sell the first 100 million smartphones. It will take 20 months to sell the first 100 million tablets.
• Android didn’t get much love at the show. Mark Lowenstein, managing director of Mobile Ecosystem, said Google’s OS is six to 12 months behind Apple iOS in terms of enterprise management and application delivery capabilities. And several attendees mentioned security problems with Android, which are limiting enterprise support for those devices.
• From Andrew Borg, senior research analyst with the Aberdeen Group: “Although people are looking at the Amazon Kindle Fire as a consumer play, many people said the same thing about the iPad. Enterprises beware.”
• And there were some differing opinions on the cost of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiatives. Craig Mathias, principal with Farpoint Group, said, “It costs more to have a mobile worker than a non-mobile worker.” And Brian Katz, director of mobility with pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis, said, “If you think BYOD is about saving money, it’s not. It saves you CapEx. It does not save you OpEx.” But Sean Ginevan, solutions architect with management vendor Mobile Iron, argued that BYOD can reduce OpEx, because users have ownership of their devices and take the initiative to solve problems themselves.

NEW YORK — Many IT managers are scrambling to control the influx of personal smartphones and tablets in the enterprise. But they might want to focus more on applications and data.

That was the message from analysts at this week’s Interop New York conference, where the consumerization of IT was a major topic of discussion.

“The device is just a detail,” said Andrew Borg, senior research analyst with the Aberdeen Group. “The real risk to the security of organizations relates to the data.”

Mobility: ‘At the center of IT planning’

Mobile devices are proliferating in the enterprise in a variety of ways, although most are part of the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) phenomenon: employee-owned smartphones and tablets being used for business tasks. Some organizations will also buy and support specific, corporate-sanctioned devices for employees.

Regardless of the approach, CIOs and IT administrators usually start by choosing which devices they’ll support. Oftentimes, these decisions are made based on which devices are most popular. But analyst Craig Mathias, principal with the Farpoint Group, said organizations should start with their data needs — security, manageability, application requirements, etc. — and then choose to support the devices that best meet those needs.

“Mobility today is at the center of IT planning,” Mathias said. “If it’s not, something is wrong.”

Focusing on data also helps organizations deal with other consumerization trends, such as the use of Dropbox and other unsanctioned cloud services to store corporate data.

“If you don’t think your employees are already using them and putting data there, you’re missing the boat,” said Brian Katz, director of mobility for Sanofi-Aventis, a 125,000-person pharmaceutical company.

More devices, more complexity

Historically, organizations have developed mobile strategies by asking three questions, according to Philippe Winthrop, managing director of the Enterprise Mobility Forum: Who should have a device? What applications should you mobilize? And what devices should you use?

But with BYOD, IT pros no longer have the only say over who has devices and which devices they use. That means they should focus on making the right applications available to the right mobile users, regardless of device, Winthrop said. But he warned that it’s not an easy task to accomplish.

“You may be having multiple platforms over multiple form factors,” he said. “The complexity … is astounding.”

Another problem with this vision of “endpoint independence” is the reliance on an Internet connection, said Paul DeBeasi, research vice president with Gartner. Organizations may consider Web apps as an alternative to developing applications for so many different devices, but with Web apps, “there’s an implicit dependency on connectivity,” DeBeasi said.

“Even with 4G, there’s a lot of variability,” he added. “These are shared networks, and they’re dependent on population density and usage and the like.”

Walking the security tightrope

Despite the focus on BYOD and the consumerization of IT at Interop, some experts said IT won’t give up so much control without a fight.

“There’s still a significant portion of the [IT] population out there that believes they need to own and manage these devices,” said Bob Egan, managing director of MGI Research.

But Sanofi-Aventis’ Katz warned that managing these devices too tightly could have adverse effects. If IT limits their functionality too severely, users will look for less secure ways to go behind IT’s back.

“Security’s got to learn to compromise with the business and figure out how secure is secure enough,” Katz said.

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.

Hewlett-Packard has told CEO Leo Apotheker to hit the bricks after less than year on the job. Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman will replace him.

Apotheker was under fire for the failure of HP’s TouchPad tablets, his idea to spin off the company’s successful PC line and the $10.3 billion acquisition of software vendor Autonomy. Thanks to those moves and repeated cuts to HP’s sales forecasts, the company’s stock has dropped nearly in half since Apotheker became CEO in November.

The news came a day after The New York Times reported that most HP board members had never met Apotheker before voting to hire him. But they’ve all met Whitman; she’s been on the board since January.

Windows Phone 7 Mango update due soon

Windows Phone 7.5, code-named Mango, will be out “in the next week or two,” Microsoft said Wednesday. The Mango update process will also deliver specialized firmware for each Windows Phone 7 device, developed to make sure all phone features and apps work with the new OS.

The Windows Phone 7 Mango update will bring multitasking capabilities, support for 4G networks, threaded email and advanced messaging and social networking features.

McAfee focuses on mobile

McAfee laid out its security strategy for mobile devices this week. The company’s approach focuses on securing devices themselves, along with the apps they run and the data they store. Antivirus, application scanning and even systems management technologies are part of McAfee’s strategy, highlighted by its Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) product. EMM is designed to give admins the same level of control over mobile devices that they have over corporate PCs and laptops.

Layoffs hit PlayBook manufacturer

Quanta Computer, manufacturer of Research in Motion’s BlackBerry PlayBook, is laying off 1,000 workers because of the tablet’s poor sales. DigiTimes reported that Quanta’s Taiwan-based PlayBook production line started with more than 2,000 employees, so these layoffs mean a 50% staff reduction.

Given the enterprise dominance of BlackBerry smart phones, hopes were high that the PlayBook could have similar success in the tablet market. But the phones’ major selling point, corporate email access, didn’t carry over, because for some reason the PlayBook doesn’t have a native email client.

RIM shipped only 500,000 PlayBooks in the second quarter of this year, and that number dropped to 200,000 last quarter. RIM’s profits plunged 59% last quarter as well, and Wednesday its stock price reached at a five-year low.

Photo (cc) by joyosity on Flickr and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Research in Motion reported dismal financial results (PDF) yesterday, with profits down 59% and sales down 10% from the same quarter last year.

The company said customer demand for its older-model smartphones was lower than expected, but shipments are expected to increase by 27% to 37% this quarter, thanks to the new BlackBerry 7 line.

Presumably, the reason a lot of customers didn’t buy older-model devices was because they knew the BlackBerry 7 was coming out. This same phenomenon might bite the BlackBerry 7 in the butt, too. RIM is planning a new line of devices with a QNX-based operating system for 2012, and customers might not want to buy the BlackBerry 7 if they think it’ll be obsolete in a year.

Plus, as critics of Microsoft’s Windows 8 launch pointed out this week, by the time these new OSes come out, who knows what kind of improvements Apple, Google and other innovative, agile companies will have made?

“Yeah, well, Apple and Google don’t matter in terms of enterprise adoption,” BlackBerry loyalists say.

That’s a fair point. But Microsoft does matter, and it’s blurring the line between PCs and mobile devices with Windows 8 — to the point that, theoretically, you could manage Windows 8 mobile devices just as you’d manage PCs. That’s a direct threat to RIM, whose major selling point is the BlackBerry’s enterprise support and management.

With the rapid innovations of Apple and Google, and Microsoft’s focus on enterprise integration and management, RIM is at risk of getting crowded out of the market.

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

In response to the bring-your-own-device phenomenon, more and more IT solutions providers are building device management practices.

These new practices work with businesses to develop user policies, tighten security and deploy desktop virtualization, so users can access corporate apps and documents on their personal devices.

“The opportunity is massive,” Entisys Solutions CEO Michael Strohl tells SearchITChannel.com. And Mauro Lollo, CTO of Unis Lumin, adds, “It is happening to these companies whether they like it or not. The concept of bring-your-own-device is here, and it is not going away.”