It is an inconvenient truth of the mobile industry that the carrier is the party who really “owns” the device. For businesses, making sure they can apply their own security and usage policy is a critical part of extending their infrastructure out to include smartphones and wireless handhelds.

If Microsoft's claims for the forthcoming System Centre Mobile Device Manager stand up, it will go some way to addressing these concerns. It should enable firms to enforce encryption of data, govern which hardware features can be used, and deploy applications over the air, so that an administrator does not need to even see a device to provision it for the user.

Integration with Active Directory could also be a key feature, as it holds out the promise that mobile devices can be managed from the same console that company PCs are.

The fly in the ointment is that this only works for Windows Mobile devices. Many firms will have a mix of Symbian, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile, and administrators will be looking for a way to manage all these with the same tools.