Last month, I wrote that “the days of two-phone living may just be numbered” in a post focusing on how the mobile phone is clearly becoming the dominant device in corporate America. Now Gartner is pinning down that number, with a prediction that by 2011, North American enterprises will be supporting more mobile phones than desktop phones.

Gartner offered this prediction in a recent news announcement, explaining that in its view, even though most users will still have a desktop phone, two years from now the mobile phone will be not only more prevalent, but well on its way to replacing desktop hardware

This is only possible, of course, with the right approach to converging the fixed and mobile devices, so that the result is a seamless environment. That means true integration between the mobile device and the corporate network, so that the user can leverage the benefits of both, such as the calling features that the corporate PBX offers and a single voice mailbox. The enterprise gains through its ability to extend the management and control features of the PBX network to the mobile device

The essence of Sprint Mobile Integration is that seamlessness, so that whether the user is on the road or at his or her desk (either before or after the deskphone vanishes in 2011), the experience and functionality are identical

Gartner suggested a four-step plan to deal with this communications evolution, and we at Sprint couldn’t agree more that now is the time for enterprises to give serious thought to how they will deal with this over the next year or two. Of particular importance are management and the development of policies regarding usage, costs, standards, and security. Also, as Gartner points out, it’s important both to standardize mobile device platforms and to have a plan for removing (or never installing in the first place) the desk hardware, in order to reduce the cost of what will amount to communications device redundancy.