Stan Gibson of eWeek.com recently wrote an interesting article about the growing pressure placed on corporate IT by the proliferation of personal devices. Gibson suggests that “corporate IT hasn’t seen anything similar to this since the early days of the PC, when renegade machines began showing up on desktops like mushrooms after a heavy rain.” It is the challenge of securing and integrating these multifunctional devices that places IT at the center of the deluge. Of course, the challenges presented by the converged mobile phenomenon are not confined to the corporate sector; obviously, Higher Ed. administration must face similar issues.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of Gibson’s report for Higher Ed. is his extended discussion of the application development for these devices. In both the corporate world and the academy, multiple platforms create an unattractive development environment, keeping many worthy applications from being released. Gibson suggests that “with a single development platform, a company [university] could create a single corporate application for a range of devices.”

He asserts that plenty could change on the application development front if Google’s Android takes hold as an industry-standard platform. Likewise, the expected emergence of an Apple SDK for the iPhone in February also poses some interesting possibilities. Such an SDK could spur interest in the iPhone as a rival application platform.

Ideally, with a single development platform, an IT manager will be able to remotely configure a multifunctional device, load software on it, set policies governing passwords, implement encryption and wipe the device clean by remote control should it be lost or stolen.

As Gibson suggests, the challenge for corporate and university IT is finding “the balance among application support, security and manageability that businesses [universities] require, while letting users [students] feel a sense of connection with and ownership of their own devices so that they use them to full advantage.”