The enterprise IT department planning to deploy or update its mobile technology platform may think it is blessed with choices. While 97 percent of the North American and European enterprise PCs run on Windows, no one operating system garners the market for handhelds. When deploying mobile technology, think beyond the devices themselves and consider how they will integrate into your corporate infrastructure.




There are four mobile operating systems to choose from: Microsoft Windows Mobile, Research in Motion BlackBerry OS, PalmOS, and Symbian; the impact of Apple's OS X on the iPhone is yet to be seen.

Based on current market share, however, IT departments, seeking to gain the most productivity for the least cost through mobile technology, should look most closely at the Windows Mobile and BlackBerry operating systems. For IT, it's important to make this decision in the context of their wider responsibilities, rather than solely by looking at the devices or the operating systems themselves. This means thinking about four key aspects when comparing these mobile platforms: infrastructure, support, integration, and availability of both custom and third-party applications. Let's look at each of the four individually.

Four Key Criteria

1. Infrastructure. Simply put, because BlackBerry devices require their own server, deploying them adds more than an incremental number of infrastructure components to the enterprise. In May 2007, the Wipro Product Strategy & Architecture (PSA) practice[1], part of the global technology services firm Wipro Technologies, compared multiple aspects of Windows Mobile devices to BlackBerry devices, one of which was impact on infrastructure. The report found that in multiple ways, BlackBerry deployment had a disproportionate effect on the number of servers required to support it.

The Wipro report stated: "Deploying a RIM BlackBerry mobile solution requires hardware and software infrastructure components to be deployed in addition to existing Exchange Server e-mail environment." This includes RIM's BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), servers running Microsoft SQL Server (which houses the BES mobile user data), and Exchange back-end servers.

It's also important to note that the Wipro research found that, because of capacity issues, "Exchange 2003 backend servers in BES customer environments supported 36 percent fewer e-mail users than back-end servers used by Windows Mobile customers. This implies that as RIM customers deploy BlackBerry mobile devices, they will also likely need to deploy additional Exchange 2003 back-end servers." The report estimates that enterprises will need to deploy one additional Exchange server for every 6,000 e-mail users.

2. Technical Support. Deploying additional hardware, of course, has ramifications in other parts of the IT department. More hardware deployed means more servers to manage, and more IT staff to do so. It also means training that IT staff on how to best support additional applications, as well as deploying resources to train users on different applications. By maintaining a more integrated portfolio of applications, an IT support staff can amortize their knowledge and focus their efforts more efficiently.

3. Integration. Similarly, using applications that are designed to integrate more cleanly with existing applications reduces the amount of customized connectivity IT departments must do. Windows Mobile technology is already tightly integrated with Exchange Server's mobile support technology. Exchange Server 2007 has also added Exchange ActiveSync, a communication protocol providing wireless access for users to download e-mail messages, schedules, contacts, tasks lists, and other Exchange Server mailbox data, without incurring service fees or added middleware costs.

4. Application availability. According to a June 2007 article in Laptop magazine comparing the BlackBerry platform to the Windows Mobile platform, the latter's third-party applications outnumbered the former significantly — just under 1,000 for BlackBerry compared to more than 18,000 for Windows Mobile (including PocketPC applications). The article also noted that software equivalents to Microsoft Office were among the most popular downloads for BlackBerry devices; however, these must be purchased, while mobile versions of Office applications are most often included with the purchase of Windows Mobile devices.

Of course, to get a competitive advantage from mobile devices, enterprises frequently develop their own custom applications. To develop for the Windows Mobile platform, programmers can use the Compact .Net development framework and leverage their knowledge of the .Net development environment used for other custom applications. The alternative: having to purchase and train on the BlackBerry Java Development Environment.

Total Cost of Ownership

All of the foregoing items contribute to the most important metric in comparing mobile platforms — the total cost of ownership. Generally, the cost of PDAs and Smartphones is decreasing over time; in May 2007, research firm Gartner reported that TCO has declined by 15 percent each year since 2004, from $1,946 per user to $1,645 per user. But the report also noted that "the TCO of PDAs and Smartphones is highly dependent on the complexity of the applications used, on the amount of support that they require, and on the impact on the productivity of the users. The cost of labor and the cost and availability of services also vary across regions."

But more specifically, when the Wipro PSA practice compared Windows Mobile devices to BlackBerry devices in May 2007, it found that the TCO for the latter were anywhere from 16 percent to 28 percent higher, depending on the size of the company (for enterprises with more than 1,000 employees, the percentage ranged from 16 to 22 percent).

Clearly, the smoothest path in the deployment of mobile devices comes when enterprises choose a platform that's already carefully and intentionally integrated into their current corporate infrastructure. To do otherwise adds additional costs for training, management, and user support.