Martha Stewart Living Put BlackBerry Mobile Fusion to Work

Steve Rollins, VP of IT for Martha Stewart Living, said his company had dramatically increased the use of mobile devices by allowing users to bring their own devices and access corporate data using Mobile Fusion.

"When we first rolled out Mobile Fusion . . . we made a conscious choice that we were going to roll it out from the bottom up," Rollins said, meaning that those devices requiring the lowest level of security were given access first. Those that required the most security were kept on corporate-owned BlackBerry smartphones.

About 17 percent of employees had company-owned BlackBerrys, Rollins said. Giving additional users the ability to bring their own devices resulted in 68 percent of employees getting mobile access to their corporate email and other work-related data, bringing the company's mobile user rate up to 85 percent.

Before implementing Mobile Fusion, Rollins said the company had a problem pushing out apps across platforms and keeping everyone's apps in sync. Now, he said, "we can just push that info out. That had been a headache for us for a year and a half, and it was a real surprise how smoothly that went. We didn't see that coming."

Another thing Rollins said his team found surprising when beginning the Mobile Fusion rollout was the number of  users who approached the team about connecting their personal BlackBerry devices. Martha Stewart Living had limited its first rollout to Android and iOS devices. "We had more questions about 'But I have a BlackBerry,' than we thought," Rollins said.