On the eve of GigaOM NetWork

Wednesday, December 8th, 2010 John Gallagher, Sr. Public Relations Manager

On the eve of NetWork – a GigaOM conference in San Francisco that the CEO of iPass will be speaking at, iPass will also be releasing its year end review of the Mobile Workforce Report. To put this into perspective, the Mobile Workforce quarterly reports have harvested data from approximately half a million mobile workers each month for a year and also iPass heard back personally from over 5,000 mobile workers this year.

The report provides great insight into what is actually happening with the mobile worker in real-time, as these reports are completed within a month of the data being collected. So it was interesting to read today, the Tech Debate column from NetworkWorld’s John Dix.

As Mr. Dix does, he brought in two respected industry peeps, Thomas Henderson, Principal Researcher at ExtremeLabs and Pejman Roshan who is the senior director of mobility for ShoreTel after the acquisition of Agito Networks.

While Henderson says the limitations of smartphones are too great for them to ever displace the laptop as the workhorse of choice; Roshan says mobile workers are primarily consumers of content, not generators, and smartphones support all the tools they need. I’ll leave it to you decide which camp you agree with. In the meantime, remember to check in with the iPass website tomorrow for a copy of the year end review.

Tags: mobile device, mobile employee, mobile workforce