Ensuring the health of a BlackBerry deployment can be an ongoing challenge -- and for many companies, a mobile management solution like those available from Conceivium, BoxTone, Zenprise and others can make the difference between handling issues proactively and simply waiting until users call in with problems.
In looking the challenges inherent in mobile device management, Strategy Analytics analyst Philippe Winthrop says it's crucial to understand how many systems a mobile device touches. "If your email is not working, why is that? It could be a bunch of different reasons -- it could be the server, it could be the BES, it could be the BlackBerry NOC, it could be the carrier, it could be the device," he says.
As a result, Winthrop says, managing and monitoring that mobile device as proactively as possible isn't just an IT issue. "It's an HR issue, it's a legal issue, it's a telecom issue, it's a procurement issue, it's an expense management issue -- it really touches on almost every facet of an organization," he says.
And that's true for companies of all sizes. Faced with the challenge of managing a global deployment of approximately 30,000 BlackBerry smartphones, Dawson Daley, wireless IT architect for IBM Canada, settled on Conceivium's mobile infrastructure and device management solution.
Prior to the Concevium implementation, the company was having trouble managing BlackBerry issues. "We were getting calls from our executives telling us that their BES server was down, or wondering what was going on in the environment -- and from an IT perspective, that's not very good," Daley says.
What's more, Daley says, they often still had trouble determining the cause of the problem. "We would have to scramble to find out what was going on, then eventually understand what the issue was, and then try to resolve the issue -- and then bring the service back online," he says.
Thanks to Conceivium's tight integration with the BlackBerry log files, Daley says he's able to stay on top of issues as they come up. "There are a number of times that we've been called about an issue with our BES server, and we can respond, 'Not a problem -- we're aware of it -- it will be back in five minutes,'" he says.
And it's not just about downtime: another common source of issues, Daley says, is activation. "With Conceivium, we're able to track the full activation process right through, so our tech teams can say, 'Here's the problem: your carrier didn't set up your account for BlackBerry services,' or 'You didn't enter the password correctly,' or 'The BES server doesn't have access to your email file,'" he says. "All those things are telltale signs that are produced in the Conceivium activation window."
Rob Holloway, director of information technology at the law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, faced a similar range of challenges before he implemented BoxTone's management solution. With a deployment of 900 BlackBerry devices, Holloway says, "We were reactive -- we had to wait for people to call in with issues."
Holloway says BoxTone has transformed the way his team deals with issues. "In some cases, second-level guys can take a look at the BlackBerry environment and see if there are issues cropping up... it allows us to be a lot more proactive in dealing with issues: if people call us, we are ahead of them," he says.
And justifying the cost of the BoxTone implementation, Holloway says, was simple. "[We] were not able to be proactive, we were constantly swapping out devices and incurring costs for devices that were dormant -- it was pretty easy for me to justify that we needed this kind of management tool in place," he says.
Similarly, California-based Varian Medical Systems, winner of a 2009 Mobilizer Award for Best IT Management of Mobile Devices, uses Zenprise's MobileManager solution to keep track of of a deployment of 1,600 BlackBerry smartphones.
And the impact of the Zenprise implementation, according to Varian senior IT administrator Matthew Morse, has been striking: calls from field engineers have been reduced by 70 percent, and the company's IT team can now support four times the number of mobile devices it previously could.
Like Daley and Holloway, Morse says the implementation of mobile management solution has vastly improved Varian's BlackBerry deployment. "Varian's deployment of Zenprise has ensured that the company can meet its 10-minute response time guarantee for life-saving medical devices," he says.
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