Dell looking at mobile device solutions

Dell recently revealed it would soon plunge into the lucrative smartphone market.

A top regional official of the IT solutions global powerhouse spoke of “increased concentration” on mobile, but noted Dell would create solutions for smartphones.

The newly privatized “largest startup in the world” will, however, grow leaps and bounds in this area by developing mobile device management (MDM) software for smartphones and tablets.

“We believe that one area that most of our customers are talking about is how to manage this influx of products,” says Saleh Haji Munshi, who heads Dell’s Indonesia and South Asia Developing Market Group (SADMG), which includes the Philippines. “How do you make sure patches are being updated? How do you ensure that the data on those devices is secure? How do you ensure that there is uptime on those devices?”

MDM is an over-the-air solution that allows the deployment of applications, fixes, data and configuration settings, security patches and other capabilities to smartphones and tablets. These include devices owned by companies and organizations, or by subscribers of mobile phone services.

In addition, this capability can be available to manage even notebook PCs, shared printers, and other devices.

“(We are) making sure that high vendor management capability exists across multiple product categories,” Munshi says. “Not only mobile phones or tablets, but also mobile PCs, printers, desktops.”

This is part of Dell’s ramped up efforts in the software space.

“All of these are intended to provide our corporate customers the ability to use technology in a way that improves their bottomline, their productivity, their efficiency, their customer insight, business intelligence,” Munshi says.

A key effort, Munshi adds, would be in the area of security software. This is part of the company’s prized enterprise solutions strengthened by its robust line of network appliances.

Dell recently acquired the San Jose, California-based SonicWALL in 2012 to rev up its presence in the enterprise market, with best-of-breed network appliances zeroing in on content control and network security. Each of these appliances or devices has functions for network security, unified threat management (UTM), virtual private networks (VPNs), backup and recovery, and anti-spam solutions.

“In security, with the amount of cybercrimes rising, we have some of the best minds when it comes to figuring out these threats. That’s an area (security software) that we’ll focus on.”