Realizing that many corporations face the daunting task of tracking, securing and maintaining the explosion of mobile devices that employees now carry, Orange Business Services this week launched a mobility management service that it says provides an holistic view of the mobile office environment. What’s particularly interesting, however, is that Orange is launching the service in the US market first, believing this is the gateway to the multinational customers it’s seeking to serve.

“We had a tough decision to make,” said Dan Jackson, director, Mobility Strategy Americas, for Orange Business Services. “We had a choice of developing it globally and taking extra time to do that. Or we could enter the US market first, early, build the business and then grow the business regionally over time. When we looked at it from a business planning perspective, that made the most sense. So it will be available for our customers who have employees and/or locations in the US.”

Most multinational corporations have a US presence, Jackson said, and Orange is prepared to serve those companies as well as corporations headquartered here.

Orange also hopes to get a jump on competitors by pushing the service into the market more quickly than normal, Jackson added.

“We want to treat this as an innovation project, so we are moving it through very quickly to take advantage of the market space,” he said. “It made sense to do it in a large, fast-growing homogenous market. It will strengthen us in terms of how we need to have this service and what we intend to do.”

The service, called Mobile Office, is a suite of enterprise tools, software and other functions designed to let corporations centrally manage the devices used by mobile knowledge workers to accomplish multiple goals. These include greater worker productivity through less downtime, security for the corporate information housed on the mobile devices, centralized upgrades for software version control, and faster deployments.

“Mobile employees are losing time having to provide their own systems integration work,” Jackson said. “They have to manage their PDAs, their laptops. In some cases, the end user is making buy decisions, which makes it tough for the enterprise to get a handle on their ROI [return on investment].”

From the corporate perspective, IT departments can’t always keep track of devices to know when they are lost or stolen, or if employees are using methods of network access that aren’t secure and putting company data at risk in the process.

Orange built its Mobile Office suite on top of its existing Business Anywhere platform. The capabilities include network access client software for laptops and PDAs; mobile device auto-inventory, software detection and compliance check, including patch distribution; remote shut-down of unauthorized devices or access; centralized management of deployment processes including staging, software installation and device certification; and customer support and service including a US help desk, an integrated portal for mobile devices and regular reports.

Orange has partnered with AT&T on the GSM side and an as-yet unidentified EVDO carrier on that side of the technology aisle to be able to provide broadband cards for laptops.
“We will provide full service from the connectivity on,” Jackson said.