Many organisations tend nowadays to let employees carry the burden of owning their own mobile phone or PDA. This has benefits for the enterprise, particularly with the reduced cost that it has to bear. Increasingly from speaking with CIO's and IT Managers as well as services providers, the awareness of twin downsides for this is becoming clear.

There is the issue of data safety and integrity, particularly for sales and other holders of confidential information, once the phone walks out the office relationships and data walk with it.

Secondly and perhaps of most importance for IT directoris is the issue with the lack of compatibility of phones and systems, this makes management difficult, prone to error and less effective from a cost point of view. This is increasing as the penetration and capability of the PDA continues to increase significantly.

The simple answer is to have the enterprise own the phone, but that does not seem to be a price that enterprises are willing to pay yet, it will not surprise if this changes in the near future.