2008 will see the emergence of a compelling case for operator deployments of Mobile Device Management

Vision Int.: Automated over-the-air mobile device management (OTA MDM) will start to gain significant market traction in 2008 as mobile operators look at ways of effectively managing and controlling terminals once they are deployed.

The market for MDM contains two separate and distinct environments - corporate enterprise and mobile operators. While the corporate market is established and has evolved into a well-accepted mechanism, a clear business advantage has not been visible in the nascent operator market. However, this is about to change, visiongain has found, with MDM in testing and trial phases with a number of operators worldwide.

Combined, visiongain estimates the enterprise and operator MDM markets will achieve global revenues in excess of $1.3 billion by 2009 and see exponential growth thereafter, by which time operator MDM will have overtaken its enterprise counterpart.

As mobile devices increase in complexity and progress towards data-centric functionalities, resulting in a growing number of annual firmware recalls, the limited ability of wireless operators to effectively manage and control these handsets has become a critical issue to address.

Operators are encouraging customers to use data services, but customers will not use these premium services unless the applications are easy to access, install and deploy. These carriers are vulnerable to increases in customer service costs, returned handsets, and more churn if they cannot provide a positive user experience, continues Kaplan.

MDM is evolving towards the ability to deliver new, customised features and services to handsets. However, while firmware OTA (FOTA) is increasingly being considered by operators as a solution to extend device lifecycles, the resulting complexity will be a challenge for both handset manufacturers and wireless service providers going forward. These and other hurdles - such as the penetration of handsets capable of accommodating FOTA and OTA configurations - need to be overcome before MDM achieves full-scale deployments.

Mobile Device Management Report 2006-2011: Evaluating the business case of FOTA and beyond, Publ 20060921