ComputerWorld has an article with the comments of Ciscos CIO on Mobile Enabling of the Enterprise...And the difficulties there in:

Despite improvements in recent years, the wireless industry has done a poor job of giving enterprises the tools they need to let workers access corporate data from mobile devices, Cisco System Inc.'s CIO Brad Boston said at the 3GSM World Congress.

He also said he was amazed as he walked around the show floor to see how many companies were focused on consumers rather than the enterprise. "There's a lack of focus on what we need," he commented in a speech.

He figures that Cisco represents an opportunity for the mobile industry to sell as many as 40,000 devices. Yet it's been a constant struggle for him to develop a mobile program for workers, he said.

Boston began planning a mobile strategy a few years ago when he found there were about 12,000 Palm- and Windows-based devices being used by Cisco workers, and that many were being used to access corporate data. He was concerned a lack of security in the devices could allow Cisco intellectual property to leak into the wrong hands. To regain control, his team began to develop a program to support the mobile devices

Over the last six months, Cisco has put 6,000 wireless PDAs in the hands of workers and plans to increase that number to 15,000 over the next six months, Boston said. Cisco salespeople will be able to place orders, check the status of a customer problem, approve contracts and file expenses.

While Boston had a lot to complain about, he said some things have improved over the past few years. Two years ago he offered PDAs to some salespeople, but if the devices ran out of power, they lost the customizations made to the software. The devices were too hard to reconfigure so the salespeople stopped using them, he said.
Prashanth RaiTag(s):Mobile, CIO