With mobile voice services now broadly adopted across Asia, the focus throughout the region is on enabling new mobile data applications and services. However Asia is a region made up of a complex set of markets with differing levels of mobile technology and mobile data maturity.

Asia includes both developing markets and some of the most advanced mobile markets in the world. In the developing markets, the ability to manage service settings is critical to getting subscribers to adopt mobile services. Operators have learned through painful experience that setting up devices correctly for new mobile services ‘before’ the customer tries to use them is key to driving up adoption of these services.

In advanced markets where devices are becoming increasingly sophisticated, mobile device management becomes even more vital, providing a means of quickly diagnosing problems, delivering and provisioning new applications and services over-the-air, securing devices and the sensitive data on them, and ensuring a positive customer experience.

Whether the mobile market is developing or advanced, the mobile operators’ objectives are similar: Improving the customer experience, driving up data service adoption, and seamlessly and cost-effectively enabling the next generation of mobile devices and services.

Solutions such as mobile device management (MDM) and using over-the-air (OTA) technology are vital to both developing and advanced Asian markets. Mobile operators need to be able to provision, support, and secure both built-in and preinstalled services such as WAP or MMS, as well as services and applications delivered after the device ships, such as IM, VoIP, pictures, music, videos, movies, mobile payment capabilities, and sophisticated business applications that require software to be installed or upgraded on the device remotely. Through MDM, the subscriber decides which device and services to use, and each subscriber’s device is managed in the context of the services he or she uses.