Mobile phone maker LG Electronics and virtualisation pioneer VMware are creating a partnership they hope will make businesses more secure and employees happier — and enable LG to grab some enterprise market share.
Using end-user virtualisation software from VMware, the two companies plan to build a new generation of LG smartphones with a separate corporate identity and email account, distinct from the user’s personal account.
“With this feature, LG mobile users will be able to safely carry a single device for both personal and work use,” the companies said in a joint statement. “Solutions using mobile virtualisation technology from VMware are expected to be available on LG smartphones in 2011.”
The new workspace on the LG phones will appear as an application amid the other functions, but it really is its own secure entity unencumbered by personal applications. The corporate environment includes email, contacts, an attachment viewer, and document editing for starters; other functions can be added.
“The diversity of devices coming into the enterprise is skyrocketing,” VMware senior director of Mobile Solutions Srinivas Krishnamurti told eWEEK. “You have Macs coming in, you have iPads, iPhones, smartphones, etcetera. Fundamentally, end-user computing is changing pretty dramatically in the enterprise market.
“The goal for us – and what users want – is to make this a secure workspace that is accessible from any device anywhere at any time. That’s the end result we want,” he explained. “It’s like taking your iPhone and your BlackBerry and gluing them together. You will have one device with two separate profiles.”
The good news for telecoms companies is that the LG-produced phones will be capable of carrying two phone numbers – thus two different phone bills.
Humphrey Chen, Verizon’s executive director of new technologies, said the companies’ planned products are needed.
“We’re seeing interest from Verizon Wireless customers in the area of mobile personas, which allow a personal mobile phone to be leveraged in a professional setting in a secure way that is IT-approved,” Chen said.
Numerous companies already have corporate standards for devices, whether it be a BlackBerry, a specific mobile phone or a netbook or tablet, and do not want – or know how to – manage personal devices. With employees already coming to work with their own devices that work just fine but represent security problems, the problem of having to juggle multiple devices has also become an issue.
When talking to eWEEK, Krishnamurti and James Park, LG director of strategy and business development, were not specific about how the new phones would work or how they would be priced. They did say that the phones should arrive on the US market in the first or second quarter of 2011.
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The VMware-LG announcement was not unexpected and serves to validate the nascent Enterprise Mobility market. Every day, OK Labs encounters requirements from enterprise IT for a secure platform for access to business-critical assets by mobile workers. OK Labs is already engaged with a half-dozen mobile OEMs as well as our operator and silicon partners. Our approach to Enterprise Mobility builds on a strong track record in mobile/wireless - 1.1 billion deployments to date.