"IBM's BYOD program "really is about supporting employees in the way they want to work," Horan said. "They will find the most appropriate tool to get their job done. I want to make sure I can enable them to do that, but in a way that safeguards the integrity of our business."

To that end, the company has issued a series of "secure computing guidelines" to employees in an effort to raise awareness of online security and the sensitive nature of corporate data, Horan said.

So far, about 120,000 users are accessing IBM's network through mobile devices, and of that total, 80,000 are supplying the device and paying the monthly service fees, according to IBM spokesman Tim O'Malley. The remaining 40,000 are using smartphones issued by IBM. The company has an "aggressive" projection for growth for this year, although a specific figure wasn't available, O'Malley said."

The article goes on to discuss IBM's usage of Lotus Traveler for access to corporate email, contacts and calendar, the deployment of  IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices and an internally developed secure file sharing application similar to DropBox.

In a related note, Bill Bodin, also from the IBM CIO's office delivered a webcast yesterday with more details on IBM's internal deployment of mobile technologies.  A replay is now available online.