The consumerization wave sweeping through IT is putting a new set of pressures on tech support teams. While for most of the last decade the biggest mobile challenge was supporting BlackBerry email, IT organizations are increasingly tasked with ensuring their mobile apps ― for both consumers and employees ― work flawlessly across a burgeoning range of environments.

And two recent landmark events in the fierce wars between mobile “ecosystems” ― the virtuous triangle of operating system, device and developer community that has proved so successful for the likes of Apple ― will have brought little comfort to CIOs hoping for an end to the headaches caused by this fragmentation.

Firstly, in the closing quarter of 2010, Google’s Android overtook Nokia’s Symbian platform as the market-leading smartphone operating system. According to research firm Canalys, Android gained a market share of 33% ― up from 9% the year before.

Secondly, Nokia announced in February that it would work closely with Microsoft to make Windows Mobile 7 (WM7) its primary smartphone operating system. But despite hopes that this tie-up would remove one platform from the equation, the Finnish phone maker failed to completely relinquish Symbian, and it plans to sell “about 150 million” more Symbian phones, said CEO Stephen Elop.

Meanwhile, Apple and BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion (third and fourth respectively in the smartphone stakes during the last quarter of 2010) are both fighting their corners aggressively, making the possibility of further market consolidation very unlikely.

The result is that, for the foreseeable future, no single mobile operating system is likely to achieve the kind of dominance that Microsoft Windows has enjoyed on PCs. That hegemony may have its detractors, but at least it reduces complexity for IT departments.

The momentum is currently with Android, but an overall victory by Google may not solve many problems. One big downside of the open source development model it uses is the fragmentation of versions and implementations. According to research in January by website TechCrunch:

• Only 0.4% of Android phones were using the latest version, 2.3 Gingerbread
• 52% were still running version 2.2
• 35% were on version 2.1
• 13% were on even older versions.

By contrast, around 90% of Apple phones use the latest version of its iOS. Add to this the serious malware concerns emerging on Android’s platform, and the pain for mobile support teams is unlikely to subside any time soon.

Further reading:
Special Report: Mass market mobility
Brian Franz, CIO of Diageo: Seizing the mobile Internet opportunity