AT&T Toggle Tackles BYOT Management

According to Mobeen Khan, executive director for Advanced Mobility Solutions, AT&T Business Solutions, Toggle is a container that is downloaded like any other application onto the mobile computing device. That data and the applications that are stored in that container, however, can be centrally managed by internal IT organizations via a portal service that AT&T has created in the cloud to manage the Toggle environment.

Khan says that Toggle, which currently runs on devices that support version 2.2 of the Google Android operating system, was developed via an AT&T Foundry initiative that is committed to developing innovative mobile applications for use within corporate environments. He adds that AT&T expects to deploy Toggle on other mobile computing device platforms in the near future.

Interest in bring-your-own-technology (BYOT) initiatives is rising within corporate environments, notes Khan, because companies want customers to absorb the cost of not only acquiring these devices, but also the ongoing phone and data plan costs associated with them. At the same time, employees don’t want to be limited to a particular device selected by their company, or have to carry multiple mobile computing devices.

In the future, Khan said that it would be reasonable to expect, however, that AT&T will leverage Toggle to more granularly track usage of mobile computing devices in a way that would make it possible to allocate specific costs to a company versus the individual end user. Toggle is already tightly integrated with other mobile computing services such as mobile device management, added Khan.

Khan added that Toggle is also a carrier-agnostic application, although at the moment there is no commitment from other carriers to support Toggle on their networks.