While enterprise devices are blasé now that BYOD is so widespread, that doesn’t mean that mobile enterprise is too. On the contrary, it seems that more smartphone manufacturers have started targeting the mobile enterprise space with new mobile device management (MDM) or enterprise mobility management (EMM) offerings. BlackBerry (News - Alert), for example, recently debuted a cloud-based EMM solution, while Korea-based LG Electronics (News - Alert) launched Gate, which uses virtualization to keep users’ professional and private live separate.
According to analysts, this shift of focus toward the enterprise has a lot to do with how tough the consumer market is right now for smartphone vendors that aren’t Apple (News - Alert) or Samsung.
"It is becoming increasingly tough, particularly for companies like LG, who is a big player but essentially a follower. It is not going to be able to call the shots with Samsung in such a dominant position globally," said Andrew Brown, executive director for enterprise research at Strategy Analytics (News - Alert).
Indeed, even with a number of critically acclaimed devices now available, LG had a mere 7 percent of the U.S. smartphone market going into 2013. It’s no surprise, then, that the company has set its sights on enterprises.
Meanwhile, businesses continue to struggle with weak security, leading them to seek out additional layers of security. In other words, this is a situation that will likely help everyone involved. Even without it, LG Gate is a unique offering based on a clever premise, so it’s hard to imagine it not taking off.
Put simply, LG Gate keeps personal and business information separate by running two operating systems on a device. This is coupled with other security and management features including data encryption, Microsoft ActiveSync and MDM to create a pretty secure overall mobile environment with only one drawback: battery life.
LG is planning to make Gate available in the U.S. first on its own G2 (News - Alert) smartphone, but it’s likely it will end up on more devices in the months and years ahead.
Edited by Rachel Ramsey