Mobile technology has come on in leaps and bounds in the 15 years since GSM networks first offered 9.6kbit/s of wireless data bandwidth.

But the most significant transformation is perhaps the sheer number of people who now regularly spend time away from their office desks, yet need to stay in regular touch with email and other information databases.

Figures from analyst Forrester Research suggest that corporate spending on mobile data systems is growing fast.

A report published in November estimates that 70 per cent of companies use mobile applications to some extent. And 58 per cent plan to increase their spending on mobile data in 2007, compared with 50 per cent in the previous year.

‘We expect some of that spending to come from increased penetration of mobile applications, though people already buying mobile data will increase their spending as well,’ says report author, Forrester analyst Jenny Lau.

‘Mobility represents roughly a third of total IT and communications budget, and I would be surprised if that does not increase further, especially as mobile budgets are controlled from the departmental rather than the central level, and parts of the existing spend might be hidden.’

Experts agree that this growing interest stems from the proliferation of workers now actively using, or looking to use, mobile applications to keep in closer, more regular touch with colleagues, business partners and customers while they are away from the office, and also to keep track of assets and products.

Other organisations are striving to improve employees’ work-life balance and productivity by laying a foundation for more effective remote working and telecommuting.

‘A lot of that mobility is no longer at the fringe of IT, but at the core; a whole communications ecosystem has evolved. The specific parts of the business and function areas that benefit most from mobility are usually those required to be out of the office or on the road, whether skilled service staff or sales personnel, and executives that travel all the time,’ says Lau.

Cost savings from the deployment of mobility systems are much harder to define, however. Investments in hardware such as laptops, smartphones and PDAs, combined with software costs and user subscriptions to mobile data services, are difficult to compare with less quantifiable returns such as improved communications and employee satisfaction.

In some cases, large-scale use of remote workers who rarely, if ever, use office resources can bring savings on property and utility costs. Forrester’s survey also estimates that many organisations are attracted by the potential to reduce their mobile phone bills, by using dual mode 3G/GSM-enabled devices.

With trials ongoing this year, this type of fixed-mobile convergence will route mobile calls made in the office onto private wireless local area networks (WLans) and then the internet or virtual private networks as a voice over IP (VoIP) call, rather than forward them over more expensive cellular networks.

Calls made to mobiles within range of the office should attract a similar discount, says Dean Bubley, analyst with research firm Disruptive Analysis.

‘A lot of organisations have uncontrolled cellular spending, and any way of getting more control and manageability over that spending, leading to a reduction in cellular bills, is a good thing,’ he says.

There are ways to cut mobile phone bills that do not involve investment in expensive dual-mode handsets, which can suffer with poor battery life and intermittent performance on voice calls because of issues with call handover between WiFi access points and 3G networks.

Phil Dalbeck, IT analyst at Glasgow Celtic FC, recently signed up to T-Mobile’s integrated extension call virtual private wire facility, when he realised that large chunks of the telephone calls the club’s employees made at the Celtic Park stadium were either to or from mobile devices on the T-Mobile network. The new service allows workers to obtain discounts on calls made between landlines and T-Mobile’s network without changing their existing handsets.

‘We now have a telephony system that uses a lead dialling code to recognise and intercept calls at the local loop unbundled exchange, and instead of sending them via BT’s or another voice carrier’s network it routes them through the T-Mobile network at less cost,’ he says.

‘This works for both fixed line to mobile and mobile to fixed line calls, and probably saves us 50 to 60 per cent off the cost of those specific calls.’

The cost of accessing email and other data applications over the mobile network is also high, though Lau says that per-megabyte tariffs are likely to come down as more operators start to offer faster mobile services and ‘all you can eat’ bundles based on high-speed download packet access (HSDPA) technology.

‘What Vodafone has done is to say it will offer HSDPA at the same price as 3G, but because you get faster data speeds, information gets to you quicker, and you spend less time connected. That said, you are also downloading more, but I would not be surprised if HSDPA prices soon start getting discounted,’ she says.

Any future success of HSDPA services is more likely to hinge on signal strength and coverage rather than cost, however.

Of the 1,059 network and telecommunications decision-makers from Europe and the US that Forrester surveyed, 27 per cent rated reliability above cost (26 per cent), with security coming in at only 19 per cent.

Certainly, as more workers use mobile devices as part of their everyday duties, the greater the risk of sensitive commercial information being lost or corrupted, especially if it is copied to smartphones, PDAs and laptops.

But while mobile security remains an acute concern for IT departments, it is often for the wrong reasons.

Many people harbour anxieties about viruses and other forms of malware d estroying vital data, or hackers hijacking internet-connected mobile devices to gain access to corporate network resources, for example.

But the same tools used in wired networks today, including anti-virus software, firewalls, authentication mechanisms and intruder detection/prevention systems, can combat all of these threats if properly deployed and configured. The real risk comes from forgetful users leaving small, portable devices in places they should not, says Jeremy Green, enterprise mobility analyst at Ovum.

‘Mobile device management is a big headache for lots of reasons,’ he says.

‘IT managers are used to managing desktops but at least desktops stay in the office. Laptops are worse because they go out of the office and get left in the back of taxis and other places.

‘Smartphones are worse still because they are much smaller and even easier to lose, but also because they are not as standardised as laptops and so managing the software on them is that much trickier.’

To combat the threat, new tools that enable IT managers to wipe remotely the contents of a mobile device if it is reported lost or stolen have emerged, while experts argue that encrypting every piece of data as it is copied to the device can effectively prevent unauthorised viewers from reading it.

‘You do get more chance of viruses entering the organisation through mobile devices as they are connected to the company network, but enterprises are becoming aware of the potential issues, and demand is driving a lot of mobile security application development,’ says Lau.

With such a vast range of portable devices to support, IT departments are likely to consider every aid available to them.

Celtic installs wireless hotspot

www.computing.co.uk/2172237

Fulham mobilises ticket data

www.computing.co.uk/2168223

What the experts say

Email is definitely the killer mobile application, but there is other horizontal software that can be rolled out easily across different function areas within the enterprise, such as SMS alerts, calendaring and personalised content applications. For organisations interested in specific vertical applications, such as those for their sales forces or field representatives, these will take a bit more time because deployment means mobility must be further embedded within the organisation.

Jenny Lau, analyst, Forrester Research

We tested a couple of 3G data cards last year and found them to be such a success and so useful that we leased about 15 and upgraded from 3G to HSDPA. This gives us a massive step in response and throughput, not only for mobile email and data access, but also for terminal services because the coaches can use it for remote access to application servers hosting training programs back at the stadium. They are also quite useful for staff visiting the far-flung regions of Europe for games, because a lot of the time you cannot rely on adequate telephony or data access resources at other stadiums.

Phil Dalbeck, IT analyst, Celtic FC

One of the applications driving adoption of smartphones and other mobile devices in the enterprise is on the voice over IP side. There is a lot of interest in fixed-mobile convergence, which needs a smarter handset equipped with a software client that integrates with the company private branch exchange. On the data side, everyone is looking for the next email. But the only candidate is sales force automation.

Jeremy Green, enterprise mobility analyst, Ovum