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.