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.

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

I looked up from my BlackBerry at last week’s Tech Policy Summit just long enough to realize how much of the audience was doing the same thing - tweeting, texting, IMing, blogging and, gasp, working from mobile devices. I was half paying attention to Walt Mossberg but my mind was in a dozen other places doing a dozen different things. And I'm not ashamed of that. That's how I, er, we, work.

Dominic Papatola, a columnist for the Pioneer Press, set out to bemoan the demise of the attention span. He concluded that tools like Twitter are actually “cross-training” for other forms of communication. A nice image that captures what short attention span living does so well. With the help of mobile technology and social media, our ability to engage in rapid cognition is more than keeping pace with the ever-shrinking time we spend processing new information. Mobile is the new fixed. 140 characters is the new column inch. We are the new fourth estate.

More tweets are sent via mobile device than PC. More than a billion iPhone apps have been downloaded (an alarmingly-high 62 per iPhone!). Astonishingly, one of every seven minutes of media consumption takes place on a mobile device (source: AOL). Information consumption patterns haven't changed like this since the printing press. We're in the middle of a series of tectonic shifts we won't fully appreciate for another 20 years.

The convergence of better mobile technology with viral social applications is feeding our insatiable appetite for instant gratification. Layer on the demise of print media, the Kindle’s verbification (as in The New York Times was “Kindled”), and it's clear we've only seen the beginning.

To wit: a college buddy (proudly) no longer answers his phone but responds instantly to text messages any time of day or night. A customer told me recently he hasn't used a laptop in three months since downloading Aeroprise and doesn't plan to go back.

Mobile applications are no longer “en vogue” or only for "technophiles" or “Berry addicts”. They’re about survival. About being the one who used the ten minutes saved to close an extra deal or turn “pending” into “resolved”. They’re less about being the first to know and more about not being the last.

Don’t agree? Look around the next time you’re at an event or in an airport. If for no other reason, your thumbs need the rest.

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

Jim Balsillie, RIM Co-CEO, announced banner earnings a few weeks back. Call it Novocain for Wall Street. A (now-clichéd) green shoot signaling the worst may be over. For RIM, that's only part of the story.

7.8 million BlackBerry smartphones shipped last quarter. Impressive considering it took six years to sell the first three million. The company just sold its 50 millionth smartphone (in 10 years compared with 17 million iPhones in 18 months), generated 3.5 billion dollars in the past three months, raised earnings guidance for 2010, and is gaining steam thanks to a stock price that has nearly doubled since March.

For years, each quarter RIM has silenced doubters but without Jobsian fanfare. Before achieving each milestone – email, battery life, security, screen resolution, camera, touch screen, WiFi, app store – skeptics said the company had met its Waterloo (yeah, pun intended). So maybe I'm a BlackBerry fanboy but there are many of us and for good reason. Every day is Christmas at RIM right now and, by association, for all of us in its orbit.

What’s more, it’s clear the competition with Apple is only bringing out the best in RIM. If you’ve been to HQ (AKA “hit Toronto and turn left at BFE”) then you know the place buzzes with type A, hyper-competitive, wicked smart Canadians who thrive on their second fiddle status in the smartphone street-cred war. Put it all together and you get a cultural phenomenon the likes of which we haven’t seen since Atari or Michael Jackson in the 80s.

All true, you say, but BlackBerry is getting trounced on the consumer side, right? Actually, what’s most notable about last quarter’s earnings is that while the BlackBerry enterprise juggernaut tightened its iron grip on wireless budgets (more on that next post), once-ridiculed consumer devices like the Pearl and Curve are stealing market share from Symbian and iPhone. Hey, even Hannah Montana’s a power user. What once was a 90-10 enterprise-consumer split for RIM is now more like 60-40 even as enterprise market share increases.

All of which is why here at Aeroprise we’re proud that when Jim Balsillie described what powered growth the past few months he singled out BMC Remedy Service Desk for BlackBerry, the product we launched recently with RIM and BMC and the first of many exciting initiatives to come from the partnership. So Jim, thanks for the kind words but you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!

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

Ever look around when phones need to be powered down before takeoff? I call it the Airplane Test. Great way to take the pulse of the handset market. Of course, fliers aren't representative of the overall phone-using population when it comes to mobile habits but they're not a bad cross-section of business users.

On today's flight from Houston, for the first time feature phones failed the test. Incredibly, of the ten devices in my field of view every single one had a keyboard and not one was made by the top three global handset manufacturers (Nokia, Motorola, Samsung). A few years ago, smartphones failed the test (in fact, a few years ago the lady next to me failed it - "What is that?" "Uh, a BlackBerry, ma'am." "How does the person on the other end know what you're typing?" [Awkward pause.]).

These days, the friendly skies look more like the neighborhood Fry's. Between Kindles, smartphones, and iPods, the plane has become a thumb gym full of treadmills for digits. The only thing notably absent are laptops. And when they're out it's to watch DVDs or use PowerPoint. Wireless data is evolving: first, it infiltrated schoolyards. Now airplanes. Next cube-ville. Mark my words.

Take the Airplane Test and let me know what you find. Next up: I've hatched a plan to convince the FAA there's no scientific basis for the 10,000-foot ban on electronics. When was the last time an itty-bitty book light took down a 747?