Remember the days of investment bankers and investors carrying around the Blackberry 850 that looked more pager than the start of today’s smart phone craze?

Also, wasn’t it just two years ago that Blackberry had a stranglehold on the enterprise smartphone?

Well, those days are obviously gone and some new smartphone research that we conducted with Forrester Consulting shows that the Financial Services industry appears to be leading the way again.

How so? In our survey:

33% of firms already support multiple smartphone platforms.

More so, 50% of firms offer some type of support for personal smartphone devices.

So much for that Blackberry stranglehold.

Also, what the research shows is that IT is starting to think about and want to manage smartphones a lot like they do PCs. This makes sense, given that the latest OS offerings on the major smart phone platforms are more useful than PCs were when that first Blackberry hit the market. See for yourself on the latest reviews of iPhone/iOS, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Android.

What are these PC-like IT management needs that Financial Services firms are anticipating?

87% of surveyed firms are concerned about compliance with FINRA, SOX, Regulation S-P, GLBA, and HIPAA (to name a few regulations.) If you want more on these regulations, this separate whitepaper that goes into much detail on explaining and meeting them for mobile devices.

Plus over 80% of firms are concerned about malware, hackers, identity theft, and device theft.

And, 80% of firms are concerned that there is a lack of accurate reporting on these devices to support efforts at managing the above list of concerns. (Click here if you’d like to see how MaaS360 offers unique visibility into smartphone devices.)

Sounds like managing PCs and laptops, doesn’t it? On that note, research firm Gartner is predicting that PC Life Cycle and Mobile Device Management will converge by 2012. (If you are a Gartner client, you can access that research under ID:G00169473.) I guess we should get ready for a five-letter acronym for that one. UDLCM anyone? But, seriously, it makes sense given that the lines are blurring quickly. And, these PCs in our pockets will quickly pose more of a risk and user support challenge than our actual PCs.

I’ll stop there on this post, but for a complete copy of the Forrester Consulting research, you can download it here.

And, for the record, I love my Blackberry (the original 8800. It’s a workhorse.)