The IRS seems to be stepping up its effort to capture tax revenue from personal use of business cell phones. A number of alternatives are being explored, but it is creating a debate about the cost of this effort and the process burden that it creates for business to comply.   Stay tuned…this is far from over.  

See the Wall Street Journal debate:

WSJ.com - IRS Defends Tax Proposal for Employer-Issued Mobile Phones*

A new interview series started today featuring yours truly. Six questions on the issues and future of mobility management.  Enterprise Mobility Matters is a great blog to keep your eye on if managing mobility is your profession.   www.enterprisemobilitymatters.com

This Thursday, I will be in Las Vegas tomorrow at the Mobile Expo/Interop show at Mandalay.   Our topic is Governance, Risk and Compliance for Mobility.    Mobility could be considered the Wild Wild West for most organizations as devices, plans, features and now applications have been acquired more often for employee preference rather than business need.   While costs are often reason enough to get this under control, policy and compliance are an additional incentive for these devices that have regulatory, legal, privacy and security concerns.     I will report back in a few days on what was discussed and discovered in Las Vegas.  

 Or if you are at the craps table, you will hear me shouting - Fi’ Dolla’ Yo!

Are you Budget Correct™?

If you have a well defined policy that outlines budget expectations and consequences for lack of compliance, you are Budget Correct™.

If you have the ability to create different groups of mobile workers, assign individuals to these groups, and apply a budget for each of them, you are Budget Correct™.   (Sales Team = $175 a month, Developer Team = $90 a month)

If you have an automated approach to gathering monthly spend from the major carriers, allocating it to end-users and comparing it to their individual budget, you are Budget Correct™.

If you can respond to an executive request within minutes to how much the enterprise will be spending on mobilizing the workforce in the coming year, you are Budget Correct™.

If you have the ability to view your organizational structure with a budget and actuals comparison from company level to department level, you are Budget Correct™.

If you have the ability to quickly identify and communicate with individuals that are over budget, then you are Budget Correct™.

If you have the ability to select a billing line item (411, SMS, international) and identify and communicate with users over a threshold, then you are Budget Correct™.

And that is just the beginning.

If you would like to hear more about Budget Correct™, a fresh new approach to mobility spend management, contact us for a product white paper and/or a product demo on MobilityCentral.

Companies of all sizes are looking to Software as a Service for an increasing number of their business applications.  Here is a nice short article on five good reasons to go with SaaS.

MDM or Mobile Device Management continues to churn as Motorola announced this week the sale of Good Technologies, which it bought just a few years ago, to Visto.   This comes not long after Internoded, a leading MDM tool for very large enterprises, gets purchased by Telecom Expense Management provider Tangoe and Nokia shut down its Intellisync MDM business.  

Mobile Device Management is a suite of IT tools that allows companies to operate better control over their fleet of mobile devices, primarily smart phones.  Given that smart phones have mobile operating system, access to enterprise data and email systems, companies are careful how these devices get deployed, what the configurations need to be, ongoing application sync,  and the security provisions that need to be managed and monitored.  Very similar to a PC.   

Unlike PCs, the Operating Systems of Smart Phones are many and varied including Android, Apple OS/X, Blackberry OS, Microsoft Mobile OS, Symbian and soon the new Pam Pre Web OS.   We can expect to see more before we ever see consolidation in this market.    This makes providing IT management tools …or MDM…very difficult.   If an MDM vendor can claim to master two or three of these Mobile Operating Systems, its a good thing…none can master them all.    While IT would like to standardize on one OS to make management easier, business pressure dictates that they accommodate a diverse portfolio and not a standard offering. With this in mind, MDM needs to be approached carefully.

MobilityCentral is not an MDM tool.  We are complementary to them.   We provide full inventory management of devices from all makes and models.  In other words we can precisely tell a company that they have 95 iphones, 187 Blackberry Curves, 129 Blackberry Storms, 239 Palm Treos, and 122 Aircards in their portfolio, which of their employees these devices are currently allocated to and what they are spending on them month to month.

This portfolio perspective puts a company in good position to decide their MDM strategy and how many different MDM tools and other tools that will need to deploy.  

Visage Mobile believes MobilityCentral is your logical first step in getting control over your mobile environment and we can do this quickly and cost effectively.   Sign up for a MobilityCentral demo or even a Free Launch to see your company’s mobile data in the context of MobilityCentral…within just a few days.    

A recent Yahoo blog points out the perils of recycling your cellphone or smartphone.  99% of all phones that are resold have personal data from the previous owners still on them.  Yikes.   That can be a huge liability. The issue is that many recycling cellphone companies apparently do not wipe the phones clean of your data before reselling it.  

That is why MobilityCentral from Visage partners with Recellular for recycling.  They guarantee that all phones sent to them are wiped clean of personal and enterprise data before being resold

Stay tuned for more information on MobilityCentral’s partnership with Recellular.

With an expected 1.5 million sales in 2009, the new smartphone from Palm, Pre, will add another level of complexity to enterprise mobility as companies struggle to standardize when innovation keeps coming at a breakneck pace.  Even before the Pre arrived, the list of top ten selling mobile devices in November of 2008 contained three devices that were not even on the list the prior month.   We can expect more innovation and more change for the foreseeable future…keeping IT’s desire for standardization at bay.

In this environment, the best approach is to adopt a mobility management strategy and solution set that can accommodate continuous change as a fundamental principle. Change triggered by employees joining and leaving the organization.   Change triggered by new devices from new vendors.   Change triggered by new carriers or new plans or new features.   Change triggered by new policies and new regulations.   Change triggered by progressive business needs, device and network innovation and a wave of new mobile applications that will produce dramatic gains in productivity.

MobilityCentral from Visage Mobile was designed with continuous change in mind.    It absorbs change quickly so you can deliver on the promise of mobility to your organization with confidence and control. 

Take a look at one of the more innovative solutions in all of mobility….MobilityCentral, OnDemand from Visage Mobile.

A recent article on the CSO website by an mFormation executive points out the foolish things employees do to create liabilities for the companies they work for.    

Take a read.

Watch even a little TV these days or flip through a magazine and you will see a lot of companies lining up to do their part to help green up the planet.  There is a seemingly endless list of little actions and big initiatives that we can embrace that adds up to a major and lasting impact on the environment.  I call it a Thousand Shades of Green.  Unfortunately, this has all the signs of a fad that will come to an abrupt end long before we accomplish the mission of consuming less energy and producing less waste….as individuals, companies, and as a nation.    

The good news is that the intense focus on Green is producing real bottomline results, introducing innovation and creating new products that would not otherwise surface.  Alternative energy is also seen as a economic revival and national security issue.   These corporate and national objectives will keep the effort alive long after advertising dollars are allocated elsewhere.   

When Visage Mobile investigated our own efforts, there were three shades of green that define our strategy: 

1. The Mobile Workforce - mobile workers are greener than traditional workers for a variety of reasons and we have the best tools on the market for managing and supporting your mobile workforce.

2. MobilityCentral as a product - we designed and developed MobilityCentral to be eco-friendly by reducing paper waste, by recycling of mobile devices, and much more.

3. Visage Mobile as a company - we are implementing several policies and practices to ensure that we are consuming less energy and producing less waste.

In the coming weeks, we will be publishing our “Green Paper” that describes our comprehensive support of all things Green.    It’s one more reason that MobilityCentral is the clear alternative for managing your mobility.    

Stay tuned.