With smartphones and other mobile devices proliferating like wildfire, corporate IT departments increasingly need capabilities to help secure, track and manage phones across the enterprise.

Mobile operators clearly find themselves positioned at the center of this new management environment as enterprise customers ask them for help in overseeing their devices. With strong experience in — and sophisticated platforms for — managing individual devices deployed on their networks, mobile operators would seem well-positioned to leverage that expertise to help enterprises with this challenge.

The opportunity is significant. IDC forecasts the worldwide market for enterprise mobile device management (MDM) software to reach $345 million by 2011. For mobile operators, providing such software — or more likely, in the case of operators, managed services — is also very strategic, allowing them to deepen their relationships with and ultimately increase sales of a variety of high-margin services to important enterprise users.

But enterprise device management is a tricky market for mobile operators. For starters, they must compete with enterprise software vendors, which have a head start in this market and a “purer” focus on solving enterprise management problems. Such software vendors also benefit by not being beholden to their own network or devices — in promise they can manage any device on any network, an important consideration for large, multinational enterprises.

Software solutions targeting the enterprise include offerings for popular enterprise devices, such as RIM's BlackBerry Enterprise Server, Nokia's Intellisync and Microsoft's upcoming Mobile Device Manager, which is expected to have a major impact on the market. In addition, many vendors offer multicarrier/multidevice mobile platforms, including large players such as CA, HP, IBM, Sybase and a slew of smaller specialty vendors. Among those players, device and network independence is a clear calling card.

“We are violently cross-platform” said Joe Owen, vice president of engineering for Sybase, with a nod to his company's Afaria MDM platform. “We don't believe in siloed management,” be it device- or carrier-specific, he said.

By comparison, operators today tend to focus on offering portals or services to help enterprises (often smaller ones) manage the devices running on their own networks. However, some larger telcos — both in the U.S. and abroad — have begun to deliver or are prepping services that will help enterprises manage devices that run not only on their own but on other carriers' networks as well.