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We figured this was going to happen at some point. Microsoft realizes that business are going mobile. It makes sense, right? They stand to gain more productivity if their employees can work from anywhere. Microsoft’s first foray into the mobile world was its Windows Mobile platform, which has seen decent success. They’ve been overshadowed, though, by the BlackBerry, which is still the business standard. Now, however, Microsoft has released software that makes management of business smart phones much like that of the BlackBerry. Competitive times, these are.

Mobile devices are acquiring the computing firepower to become crucial productivity tools for business people and management nightmares for technology administrators. “The IT (information technology) folks, the same as it was in the PC environment, don’t want to roll out 10,000 devices. They want roll out one device 10,000 times,” said Michael Gartenberg, analyst at Jupiter Research. “Microsoft is hoping to replicate the success and the model of the PC.”

Now, BlackBerry still has an advantage over Microsoft: They make the hardware and the software that runs it. However, Microsoft also sees that advantage and is trying to take care of evening the field in that regard. They’ve partnered with Enterprise Mobile in order to build the handsets — and the plan is to customize them for particular organizations.

You can bet Samsung, Motorola, and Palm are jumping for joy at this. They’ve always played second, third, fourth, whatever fiddle to Research In Motion. Those three will be the main initial beneficiaries of this Microsoft software, as they’ll all roll out new handsets in the second quarter of 2008. That will be right around the time the software platform is unleashed.

[Smart Device Central]

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