Mobile Device Management Now a Top Priority for Vendors.

"Just this week, systems management vendor CA released its first iteration of a mobile device management solution, called simply CA Mobile Device Management (MDM). In its current state, CA’s solution supports just BlackBerry, but in the near future, support for Symbian and Windows Mobile operating systems will be added...

Recent research from IDC estimated that the mobile device management market is poised to grow from $205.7 million in 2006 to $345 million by 2011...

The overall goal of CA’s MDM is to take a good chunk of the management onus away from administrators and pass it on to the users themselves with the self-service portal, where users can activate devices. Administrators still retain a level of control over exactly what features and functions users can tinker with — like data wiping, locking and unlocking devices, and resetting passwords...

Ptak said that while jumping on the device management bandwagon is good for big vendors like CA, Microsoft and HP, it may not bode well for smaller vendors. The fact that the major players are jockeying for mobile device management shows that devices are being recognized, however, and that is a trend Ptak believes will continue.

'They’d be really foolish not to support device management,' he said. 'You need robust mobile device management to go along with network and systems management.'"

CA develops enterprise smartphone management.

"The India Technology Centre (ITC) of Computer Associates (CA), one of the largest IT management software companies in the world, has developed a mobile device management (MDM) product, which can manage an entire corporate mobile infrastructure from a single console.

MDM will provide large organizations with enterprise-level device management tools for the most popular smartphone platforms from companies such as Microsoft, RIM and Symbian...

It provides over-the-air management, device-independent consolidated asset inventory, configuration management, policy compliance and security management."

CA licenses Funambol's mobile technology.

"Funambol, a developer of open-source data synchronization software for mobile devices, has licensed its Sync4j mobile application server to CA Inc... Mobile applications, devices and services will be one of the focuses of CA's research efforts over the next year, the company said at its CA World conference in Las Vegas in November."

CA offers peek at Smart Phone Manager, wireless developments.

"The new Smart Phone Manager Server can gather information on devices such as who owns the device, what it is, how it communicates, which network it is registered on and which department it belongs to. The server can also apply security policies to the device."