As wireless data becomes a more important and widely used business tool, device management becomes a key market opportunity for service providers, according to an independent study of CIOs conducted for Mformation Technologies, a provider of device management capabilities.

The study, conducted by independent research firm Coleman Parkes, involved 200 interviews with CIOs and telecommunications directors of Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. and Europe. It found that not only are more enterprises using wireless data via smart phones and other devices, but they are using more applications and seeing greater productivity as a result.

In U.S., 60% of managers are using company-supplied mobile devices and one-third of all staff, with that number growing.

“The smart phone is already a very important mobile productivity tool – 60% of managers are already using them,” said Matt Bancroft, chief marketing officer of Mformation. “That proportion is going to increase. There is a lot of energy around the smart phone as a device, either as a replacement for the laptop as the key mobile data device people carry with them, or if not a replacement then a complement. The survey showed people are talking more about the kinds of services and applications that enterprise users are using on their mobile devices – mobile email, Internet, calendar are commonly used.”

In addition, he said, new applications are emerging. The survey showed that by 2009, CIOs expected to be using mobile VoIP (70%), instant messaging (80%), push-to-talk (55%) and picture/video messaging (63%) applications.

With all of this comes concern about how corporations will manage and keep track of all the wireless devices employees will be using.

“There is very strong recognition, now that mobile data networks have become more sophisticated and are able to offer so much more capability, that there is a very strong requirement for management capabilities if the full benefits of these new technologies are to be made available,” Bancroft said.

Eighty-four percent of CIOs surveyed said device management is critical, he said, and “when asked how they believe they wanted to be able to obtain devise management, 79% had a strong preference for obtaining device management as a hosted or managed service from a service provider.”

That is, of course, the very field in which Mformation plays, providing device management today through a configuration platform that sits on a server in the service provider’s network and communications with a software agent that is downloaded onto the managed device.

“The enterprise is able to set policies through a Web-based interface that the operator makes available to them,” Bancroft said. When a mobile device connects for the first time or when something about the device changes, the server can provide updates, either automatically or via manual triggers. “

In addition, he said, a diagnostics manager enables the corporate help-desk to easily provide service and support, by connecting the Mformation’s device management server, through which the help desk “can see what kind of device it is, query the device for vital signals, see where it is physically located, what network it is connected to, the battery level, the memory level, applications and services, and settings, all done in a visually simple fashion,” Bancroft said. “Just by looking at that and the warning signals we put on the screen for the help desk is a powerful diagnostic tool. It reduces the cost of IT help desk, enables employees to work more productively, and is more positive for employees so they are more likely to want to us new applications.”

The system also provides security such as the ability to lock a device if it is stolen, to erase data on the device remotely and to back up the information on that device to a central server because of regulatory requirements.