The company published these principles, or best practices, to help organizations better understand how to manage their increasingly mobile workforce. We spoke with Gentile to delve into what led Odyssey to come up with each of its seven principles. That way, we felt, enterprises could get the most out of them.

Gentile said the seven principles resulted directly from Odyssey's interactions with customers. For instance, one customer went down one unsatisfactory MDM path before turning to Odyssey. In the end, the customer wished it'd tried to scale the other solution first before purchasing. You see, the previous MDM platform worked great on twenty mobile devices, but problems arose once they got to a 100, 200, 1000 devices. Eventually, the whole system simply fell apart.

Hence, Odyssey Principle #3: Stress your MDM options.

You can't go into a MDM solution with rose colored glasses. You must make sure they scale before wide scale deployment. That means running a pilot test and performing due diligence with reference accounts using the product in similar deployment scenarios.

For more of Odyssey's Seven Principles of Mobile Device Management, including Gentile's backgrounders and comments, see Part II of this article here.

The Road to Mobile Management
Founded in 1996, privately-held Odyssey has focused on enterprise mobility from the beginning, making the move to device management specifically in the early 2000s. There was a "shift in what we were hearing from customers," Gentile explained to PDAStreet.

Initially, Odyssey built a successful business around solutions that facilitated the connection between mobile apps and complex data stores in the enterprise. These mobile middleware-type products targeted enterprise developers.

But then, one of its most important customers, a large retailer—all Gentile could tell us was it is one of the world's largest—asked Odyssey to help it manage a growing deployment of mobile devices. Consequently, after six months of collecting data about where the customer's mobile deployment, Odyssey concluded that MDM products, as they then existed, weren't serving the retailer all that well.

This led Odyssey to develop its own mobile device management solution, Athena. The pilot test for Athena, for the retailer that started Odyssey on its current road, supported five thousand devices. Today, Athena manages 190 thousand mobile devices for the retailer.

That is the origin of Odyssey's device management direction. As Gentile noted, "it came from the hard requirements of an enterprise customer." Not just the unnamed retailer, but additional customers who confirmed interest in the feature set Odyssey would develop into Athena.

Gentile added, it is "much easier to sell to IT than developers, which the earlier products targeted. It was a good shift for us."

Athena: A Mobile Device Manager
Athena, according to Odyssey, is an enterprise-class MDM product for Windows Mobile devices. It provides command and control over mobile devices by integrating with Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003, Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 and Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager 2008.

Its extensions enhance and complement the native device management capabilities of these platforms by capturing and aggregating knowledge about your mobile devices, the applications they are running, and the networks they're operating on. Enterprises can also distribute software and settings to mobile devices from a central location and help end users remotely through interactive troubleshooting and live remote control tools.

Gentile asserted Athena's architecture is unique among mobile device management software products, because it sports a web services-based architecture that enables the platform to be easily integrated into existing management platforms. This makes it an ideal offering to be licensed by ISVs and OEMs and exposed through existing consoles, he added.

Today, Odyssey supports over two million mobile devices, with customers in all market segments. From those in high tech to retail to trucking to enterprises with large sale forces and beyond: organizations with large CRM (customer resource management) deployments; in some vertical segments; and transportation and logistics businesses.

One example of the latter is Old Dominion Freight Line which has deployed mobile devices nationwide. This company, which uses Athena to manage its mobile device deployment, operates its mobiles with two different wireless carriers, Verizon Wireless and AT&T, as it couldn't get all the required coverage from a single mobile operator. In addition to Athena, Old Dominion's deployed fleet management applications developed in house and uses some of Odyssey's first generation middleware products for signature capture, printing receipts off of Bluetooth printers, and real time push to devices.

Gentile said one of the things Odyssey did differently with its MDM platform was to not include a component or a proprietary console. In fact, this was one of the requirements from the original large retailer that got them into the MDM market. That way Athena can be used within a third-party console.

Odyssey's original customer employed an internal troubleshooting and a management system for desktops. So, because Athena is open, it could integrate its MDM services into an existing management system.

Athena supports HP OpenView, Tivoli and, of course, the Microsoft System Centers. All of those management consoles support XML interfacing, which enables Odyssey's customers to fold Athena into their existing consoles.

A modular agent with plug-ins sits on the mobile device. Due to SOAP, it can interact with the enterprise and serve as a client to perform its various functions. There is also an HTML engine wrapped around the soap interface-a little embedded web server-which allows Odyssey to offer different layers of service using the same agent.

The modular nature of Odyssey's on-device agent allowed it to develop packaged solutions to extend the MDM capabilities of both of Microsoft's System Center offerings. Also, Odyssey could remove features served out of the box by Microsoft that duplicate those offered by Athena.

Gentile said his company is looking at other management platforms to bundle Athena with, including HP OpenView, to see what complimentary services it can offer with them. Each of these products, Microsoft System Center and HP OpenView, for instance, has a huge installed base in enterprises facing the same conundrum: how to better support and control mobile devices. And wouldn't it be nice if IT could mange mobile devices through the same console, from a "single plane of glass," as Gentile put his company's philosophy, it manages its desktops.

In addition to the bundles, Odyssey is able to OEM or license technology to others that then private label Athena as their own. It is Athena under the covers, just re-branded. So these companies may look like competitors, but is Athena under the hood.

There's CloudSync and Motorola, two licensees that both created their own consoles but use Odyssey's on-device agent, for example, and a dozen other companies that have either done the same thing, used just the console, or are offering rebranded versions of both the console and agent as their own.

Supported Mobile Platforms
Right now, Athena supports Windows Mobile and CE and Win32 on the embedded side. In addition to smartphones, PDAs and rugged handhelds, this gets them into the management market for netbooks, Ultramobile PCs, kiosks, cash registers, etc., according to Gentile.

Odyssey is in device platform expansion mode now, however. It is in the process of performing technical assessments on several mobile operating systems to make sure they can provide the same level of MDM service with them as with Microsoft, Gentile added.

Odyssey is, of course, evaluating RIM BlackBerry, the leading smartphone platform in corporate America. According to Gentile, it looks like Odyssey can achieve close to, if not the same depth, of control with BlackBerry smartphones as it does with Windows Mobile models.

What isn't clear to us is what Odyssey can offer in the way of mobile device management for BlackBerry models that RIM doesn't already do with BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

Gentile said his company should be able to provide nearly the same level of support for Symbian (mostly Nokia) smartphones as with the BlackBerry.

As for the two of the newest and hottest smartphone platforms, Google Android and Apple iPhone, Gentile said these are more restricted than the others, so support with Athena becomes more difficult. Palm's brand new webOS, first used in the its Pre model from Sprint, and the ancient Palm OS didn't even come up as options.

He has a lot more hope that Odyssey will eventually be able to bring Athena to Android than the iPhone.

That's because Android is more open, to a point. Gentile noted how the Android SDK sandboxes applications, which from a security perspective is good, but does not give access to resources outside of the sandbox. To manage an Android phone effectively, a mobile device management solution must be able to get information at a lower level.

Gentile is not worried about Android yet, as shipments are still relatively low. He hopes to be ready for them once sales rise and they start to appear in greater numbers in the enterprise, however.

He's not so bullish on the Odyssey's prospects for the iPhone. It is just that Apple is, well, a bit too controlling about what resources it gives developers access to, a real problem for when it comes to device management.

Apple "has a very Machiavellian approach about what they will or won't allow," Gentile explained. It's not a technical issue at all, as the iPhone is fully capable of running applications in the background, which Athena requires to do its job. But apple won't allow it. And the new push notification feature, brought to the iPhone with OS 3.0, simply won't cut it for mobile device management in Gentile's view.

For example, even something as simple as taking a software inventory, you can't do that as a developer for the iPhone right now. Apple knows the list for iTunes purposes. But an IT manager being asked to support iPhones cannot. This simply won't do for the enterprise.

See here for Part II of this feature, where Gentile delves into his company's Seven Principles of Mobile Device Management in detail.