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BLOGGER: ANAT BEN YAACOV 

When it comes to company communications, some companies assume their employees have a split personality – there’s their work persona and their private persona – but in 2011 (“the year  Mobile IT was born”), this all finally started to change.

According to GigaOm, IT departments have finally started to embrace the fact employees want their workplace to support their personal devices like tablets and smartphones.

And even though a recent Forrester survey revealed one-third of companies still don’t support employee-owned smartphones, Forrester also said enterprises are now rethinking their strategies to include both company-owned and individually owned devices. This isn’t just about cost, but also about the IT alignment involved in giving employees access to internal networks.

This was the issue raised by a friend who started thinking about replacing his company-subsidized phone with a new private smartphone with a corporate SIM. However, he was worried about the cost, because in addition to the one-time purchase fee that he’d have to pay, a smartphone would dramatically encourage and increase his data consumption, resulting in additional quotas (and charges) not supported by his company.

Fortunately for him, his company had a clear policy in place to solve this, enabling him to increase his data plan to 1G (or higher) at a discounted cost that would take the charges automatically from his salary. There’s also a threshold regarding private calls, which would be charged to him via his service provider on a private invoice which lists the charges beyond what his company pays.

Companies can’t afford to limit employees by the device they’re using or the usage they need. This flexibility is hugely important – both for the company and end user. The company keeps their employees happy while controlling its communication costs and budget. And users are more satisfied with subsidized plans which give them the flexibility to upgrade the service to fit their needs, which makes them happier with the relevant service provider.

Companies and service providers who don’t (or can’t) support services like dual personas, be warned… You’ll have to catch up with Verizon Wireless and AT&T who already do.

 AT&T’s Toggle supports two separate personas on any Android phone the employee chooses to buy (software to support iPhones is being developed).  One persona includes enterprise-grade email, calendar, contacts and messaging apps and a browser, all of which can securely access corporate data. The other is the open Android platform, where users can download and use any app they please. AT&T will sell the service to enterprises but will allow them to apply it to phones running on other operators’ networks.

Since watertight cost control is a critical part of this, service providers must be able to help companies to manage different policies and support different contracts with employees to reflect both the company’s policy and communication budget.

The pricing flexibility required to support employee-owned devices is more complicated than before as it now will involve policies, event and charge distribution and multiple identities per subscriber. And when building their offers to enterprises, service providers need to take into account that they’re negotiating with both financial and IT departments, and the offering should include pricing and commercial on one hand and IT, security and support on the other.