With most pundits having declared that the tech recession is over in corporate IT spending (click here for Forrester’s case or check out Cisco’s latest results), I thought that it would be good to reflect on the impact of the recession on the enterprise mobility market. Largely the recession has been very challenging for many businesses and individuals. But, in my opinion, there have been some sustentative positives for enterprise mobility from this pause in growth. These positives primarily stem from either an increased pace of innovation and a refocus of IT resources on some critical, but taken for granted areas of mobile computing.

1. Taking Inventory

Most IT shops stopped all but essential capital spending in 2009 and aimed their freed up human capital to find even further savings. In the arena of mobile computing, the first step was creating a solid inventory and analysis of mobile assets. Given that the future is more mobile and less office bound, this intelligence will be critical to managing and securing the overall business. So, the naval gazing of the recession period has helped businesses realize that yesterday’s solutions to desktop management and security need to be updated for the increasingly mobile landscape.

2. Timely Cloud Cover

The recession has brought cost effectiveness into nearly all decisions in our personal lives and certainly every decision by IT executives. While in years past, achieving lower costs would have to be solved by vendor negotiations, headcount reductions, searching for scale, and consolidating operations, in 2009, the vendor community brought real technical innovation to the table in the form of proven and effective cloud computing and software-as-a-service solutions.

There is an emerging set of cloud-based, mobility management platforms that can manage all of a business’ remote and virtual assets, as if they were still attached to traditional LANs. More so, this class of solution helps solve the visibility gap identified above, but providing reliable and accurate inventory and assessment of mobile devices anywhere, anytime on the corporate network or on the public Internet cloud.

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