By Dan Turchin, chief executive officer and co-founder of Aeroprise. Follow Dan on Twitter.

Here's an interesting exercise I tried last week: go back two years in your day planner. What were you doing? How did you do it? Pull up last Tuesday and ask the same questions. Remarkable, huh? I spent more time on the road, interacted with fewer people, knew less about their lives, and had a ton more paper in mine. Case in point: wheels up two years ago meant forced down time. Not so today. With in-air WiFi and faster, more capable devices, 5B is just an office with a view (and a fat dude snoring but that for another post).

Work and life are digital. But more important, they move faster. They're more agile, more complete - all in a way that makes them richer and more fulfilling. Extend these trends out two years and factor in the Droid generation - adolescents raised today with the expectation that anything is a click away - and it's tough to imagine what we'll be doing and how we'll do it. One thing is clear: life won't happen in front of a PC and service delays and information gaps won't be tolerated.

Inspired by that world, we recently launched our most exciting product ever. It extends the value we've always provided IT to the rest of the business. It's not a product launch as much as a reminder that technology is catching up with life as quick as life is catching up with technology. The product is called Mobile BMC Self Service and it devolves control over how and where we work to where it should have always been: the hands of end-users.

Mobile BMC Self Service gives you and me, mortals with phones, the power we've always needed. We can now submit and manage service requests, browse the catalog, and know in real-time wherever we are when our issues are being worked, by whom, and when they'll be resolved. The way to build more dynamic businesses isn't to add features or work longer hours. It's by spending more time collaborating and less time waiting. It's by making fewer calls to the service desk and more calls to action that drive innovation and create business value.

What we announced is bigger than a new product, bigger than anything we could do alone. It's the next step in the evolution of enterprise self-service. It's the culmination of years of hard work and industry leadership from BMC, Aeroprise, and RIM. You'll be hearing more about it in the months ahead but consider this your invitation to join a dialog that's just getting started and will influence how we all work and live for years to come.

Want to learn more? Check out this video of Mobile BMC Self Service in action.

The postings in this blog are my own and don't necessarily represent BMC's opinion or position.

-by Dan Turchin, chief executive officer and co-founder of Aeroprise. Follow Dan on Twitter.

I was on a panel last week about mobile app stores at the Silicon Valley China Wireless Tech Association’s Annual Conference. Dev Khare from Venrock moderated the discussion and Luke Bao from China Mobile, Curtis Sasaki from RIM, Brian Vogelsang from Qualcomm, Mark Anderson from HipLogic, and Charles Yu from hiSoft participated. The central questions: what does the democratization of mobile information - heralded by the rise of the app store - say about the future of our mobile lifestyle? What does the elimination of (now-clichéd) walled-gardens mean for everyone in the mobile value chain: developers, carriers, handset manufacturers, and end-users?

Thought I’d share a few impressions from my prep and what I learned from the panelists. First, by the numbers: five major stores have been announced to date. All are chasing Apple’s wildly popular, wildly successful App Store. To wit: can you name any of the others? They are BlackBerry’s App World, Google’s Android Market, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile Marketplace, and Palm’s webOS Application Catalog.

Apple’s App Store now has more than 85,000 applications submitted by more than 20,000 publishers and receives more than 2,000 submissions per week (new apps plus updates). 40 full time Apple-employed reviewers vet about 1,000 applications weekly and the average wait time for approval (or rejection) is about 13 days. There’s currently a backlog of about 15,000 apps pending review – growing at about 1,000 per week. And as of this week two billion apps have been downloaded, or roughly 37 per device.

So why should you care? Well, in the enterprise we technically don’t care about app stores. In fact, most of our thinking about them is confined to figuring out how they get uninstalled or disabled. They present massive security threats and make managing mobile devices infinitely more difficult. They’re poorly designed for client-server applications, aren’t policy-based, aren’t cross-platform, and don’t support internal custom apps.

But those are all reasons not to care, you say. What gives? First off, in the future there will be enterprise-oriented, private app stores. They may or may not be better than current app distribution methods like the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) but they’ll exist. More important, whether you love, hate, use, or ignore app stores they’ll continue to reinvent how we use mobile devices. And because mobile will play a prominent role in your personal and professional future, you should care about them.

Here’s an analogy: the internet existed before broadband but it was a novelty. We (that’s the royal “we” in the geek chic community) used it for IRC, bulletin boards, and primitive file sharing. As dial-up connections were replaced, the internet changed. It became interactive, colorful, and dynamic – the hub of digital lives that didn’t exist before.

Mobile is undergoing that same shift – from pimply teen to varsity quarterback – only this time it’s more dramatic, it’s happening faster, and it was triggered by the rise of app stores. All of a sudden, handhelds are computing devices that are also phones. They’re judged less by whether or not they have a speakerphone and more by their strength as platforms for social networking, e-commerce, gaming, and business. The pace of change will only accelerate in the next few years – and app stores will continue to define the mobile experience.

A video of the panel discussion is available as a link from this blog post on iphonasia.com.

The postings in this blog are my own and don't necessarily represent BMC's opinion or position.

-by Dan Turchin, chief executive officer and co-founder of Aeroprise. Follow Dan on Twitter.

Why is RIM's (NASDAQ: RIMM) ascension to the top spot on Fortune's Fastest Growing Companies (FGC) list a landmark event for IT? In part, because we put them there. But mostly because it validates what we've known for years: mobile applications are big. Big like the end of cubeville. Big like no more calls to the help desk or triage-gone-awry downtime. Big like the IT guy is Einstein with piercings.

But first, some historical perspective. The FGC list typically reads like the warning label on rat poison. To get on it, either drill for something scarce and toxic or sell loads of something that kills people slowly. Until this year. RIM hasn't cracked the top 20 in any of the past five years. Only one of the last five winners (Yahoo! in 2005) is a tech company. But now, enter mobile applications. Enter a year when Grandma bought a smartphone. Enter a year when applications made mobile devices THE must-have business tool. And all of a sudden the top spot goes to the company that is synonymous with the new way IT services get delivered. No surprise but certainly a landmark event.

Remember: what distinguishes the BlackBerry from all other handhelds isn't that the Governator uses one or Bono (Apple traitor) sings about them or half of all ever sold in the past decade shipped in the past year. What distinguishes BlackBerry from iPhone and other contenders is that it's the mobile platform for business. One that has been wildly successful because of how IT has stretched and pulled it into so much more than an email device.

Five years ago, you were at a disadvantage if you didn't have a mobile phone. Three years ago, if you didn't have mobile email. Two years ago, if you didn't text. This past year, if you weren't using mobile apps. From now on, it's mobile line of business applications that will separate organizations with a pulse and a future from everyone else.

The postings in this blog are my own and don't necessarily represent BMC's opinion or position.

-by Dan Turchin, chief executive officer and co-founder of Aeroprise

Dear CIO:

I'm here to divulge your secret. That one you keep guarded from vendors then brag about over beers at bonding events. We're on to you. But I want you to know there's nothing to be ashamed of and you're not alone. Every one of the 500,000 gear heads lining up for a 3G S this weekend knows exactly how you feel.

You don't purchase mobile software based on Return On Anything - investment, capital, or otherwise. At the moment of truth, you buy because you need to, because you don't want to be left behind, because your peers would mock you for being a laggard if you didn't.

You purchase mobile applications because it's a new world and even though you're not exactly sure you believe those payback models or all the MBA speak you know mobile applications are here to stay. And while you can't predict where the S&P 500 will be next year you know your users will be more mobile in 12 months than today. And you know mobile devices keep getting better, networks keep getting more reliable, service costs keeps falling, and battery life keeps improving. But most important, you know you're roadkill if you think you can survive without staying connected.

One of your brethren told me last week (in confidence, no names to protect the sheepish) that he'll never look at the Aeroprise ROI model his analyst built. But it'll be there for posterity, confirm he did due diligence, and ensure his decision sidesteps CFO scrutiny. Why did he buy? There are a dozen reasons and while all of them relate to saving money and providing strategic support to the business not one involves numbers on a spreadsheet.

The problem isn't that ROI is obsolete. In fact, it’s more relevant than ever. It's just necessary but not sufficient - like the rental car rider on your auto insurance policy or the cardboard sleeve for your latte. ROI is particularly useless as a guide for mobile projects because so little is known up front about where actual cost savings will occur. Oh, they're there - but the most successful projects are ones that ooze into new business units and creep across department lines to generate returns never anticipated.

So don't let me burst your bubble oh deity of data, sultan of servers. Feel free to pretend we don't know. Keep ridiculing our gullibility. But then do more of same - believe in the power of mobile solutions to transform your business. Think beyond the spreadsheet and create your own ROI reality unfettered by macros and pivot tables. Then, if you're so bold, share your story. You'd be amazed at how many closet ROI heretics will benefit from it.

-dan

The postings in this blog are my own and don't necessarily represent BMC's opinion or position.