Verizon & Sybase to manage corporates' mobile 'fleets'

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 10 September 2009 11:43

IT Industry - Strategy

Verizon Business has launched a service for large corporates, to be offered worldwide, managing and supporting their growing 'fleets' of mobile devices. For some of its components the service will use technology from Sybase. Rollout in Asia Pacific is scheduled for later this year.

The new Verizon managed service, Verizon Managed Mobility Solutions, will offer inventory and expense management, logistics, mobile device management and security, and application management. Sybase has been selected to support the mobile device management and security modules.

Mobile device management embraces delivering tools, applications and data to employees in a timely manner, and creating and enforcing flexible mobile policies across devices, groups or individual users. Mobile Security will enforce access codes, establish 'lock/wipe' policies, encrypt devices and data cards and deliver firewall and antivirus applications and supports mobile access to corporate applications

Four of the Verizon Managed Mobility Solutions modules are targeted for a September 30 launch in the US and 19 countries in Europe with a roll-out in the Asia-Pacific region slated for later this year. The fifth module, application management, is currently under development and is planned for launch in 2010.

According to Nancy Gofus, senior vice president – global business products, Verizon, "Managing multiple fixed and mobile operator contracts and communication costs, selecting mobile devices, network interoperability and device management and security are unwieldy for most enterprises. Sybase is a proven leader in device management software and together we are well placed to minimise the pain points for customers through our new highly accessible, comprehensive managed mobility service."
 
Verizon cites Forrester Research forecasts that 73 percent of the global enterprise workforces will be mobile users by 2012, saying this represents 187.9 million mobile users in 2008, growing to 397.1 million users in 2012.

Ian Thain, Sybase's UK-based senior technical evangelist for enterprise mobility, told iTWire that management and security were essential prerequisites for any organisation contemplating extending enterprise applications to mobile devices, and would become a more pressing issue as integration became tighter.

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