Conley followed the Zenprise tool's resolution instructions and made a set of changes, such as splitting the BES and SQL servers onto separate machines and installing a number of recommended service packs.

"Within four days of having the product in, we were able to correlate root cause and be able to show ROI from that," Conley says. "Within a month, a problem that was ongoing for five to six months just disappeared." Better yet, he notes, fewer people were calling his team with problems. Instead, the Zenprise tool began offering early warnings on issues so he could report them to users before noticeable problems appeared.

Zenprise Resolution Instructions

Though other companies offer products that can be tweaked to monitor the BlackBerry e-mail environment, such as IBM's Tivoli and Hewlett-Packard's OpenView, Zenprise currently offers the only product that includes full automation of the BlackBerry management process, according to Datoo.

Conley says that since the day his team installed Zenprise for BlackBerry, the Red Sox IT staff has been able to find root causes for every BlackBerry-related issue they've encountered, major or minor, and promptly address those issues with confidence that the suggested fixes will work.

Today, Conley has only one person who spends any of his time—a mere 10 percent—on BlackBerry support. Zenprise does the rest, he says. A year ago, two IT staffers handled BlackBerry support and the organization had only a quarter of the devices it supports today.

Smartphone use is expected to grow rapidly over the coming years, and CIOs need to start adjusting their BlackBerry and mobile device management (MDM) strategies, especially since many do not plan to increase the sizes of their IT staff to match that growth. According to 2008 State of the CIO research, 47 percent of CIOs expect the number of IT staffers they employ to remain static or decrease in the coming year, and they're currently spending 60 percent of their IT budgets on simply keeping the lights on.

So would Conley recommend Zenprise to CIOs or IT departments looking to automate MDM? "If you have a BES server, Zenprise should be built into the cost," he says. "That's about as strong of a 'yes' as I can give."

If he could criticize one thing about the Zenprise for BlackBerry product, however, it would be that it's currently available only for BlackBerry mail infrastructure. But that won't be an issue for much longer, according to Datoo. The company says that in the coming months it will announce support for all mobile devices that connect to Exchange servers, including Symbian devices, Windows Mobile devices and iPhones.