Mobile Monday Italy’s October session in Milan was devoted to mobile device management. Organizer Jaana Heikkila (fluent in Finnish, Italian and social networking …) arranged for three perspectives on the topic:

- Industry perspective by Abraham Joseph of the Device Management Forum
- Consumer and mobile provider perspective by yours truly
- Enterprise perspective by Jouko Vierumäki of FromDistance

I was asked to kick off the event, which I did with the provocative presentation title “Each month 250,000 Italians struggle to configure their mobile phone”. Based on the market share of mobile network providers in Italy, I went on to state that this means 100K struggling customers at Telecom Italia Mobile, 83K at Vodafone Italy, 44K at Wind and 22K at Three (H3G). Each month…

This raised a few eyebrows in the audience of course and triggered a discussion. Our numbers are derived from the aggregated analysis of what we see with our customers in the Netherlands, Belgium and the UK on a day-to-day basis. On the other hand you can make the calculation looking at annual churn, mobile internet penetration growth and the OTA activation success rate averages. As the use of mobile data services is growing, this headache gets more and more attention within mobile providers. The pressure on first and second level call center support is growing costly and marketing wants to be able to count all new customers as mobile internet users to increase ARPU.

Jouke Vierumäki made a serious but at the same time funny observation that within enterprises, today the most widely used device management system is Excel (add or delete a row with mobile phone details…). Little worry about security, loss of data, user support etc. Abraham Joseph provided the 30,000 feet perspective of the industry in this compact session in advance of drinks at “Le Biciclette”. Later this month, Abraham’s organization will host the industry event Managing Innovative Devices and Services in London. Let me know if you will be there as well – I’ll try to deliver an even more provocative presentation for that international audience. If you are interested in receiving a PDF copy of the Mobile Monday presentation, please send us a message using this form.