How Many Vendors Does it Take to Manage a Mobile Enterprise?

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There's a whole slew of companies peddling mobile device management (MDM) software and services to mobility-challenged enterprises. MDM offerings are of keen importance to IT departments suddenly facing throngs of disparate mobile devices banging at their enterprise network doors.

By some counts, MDM vendors currently number more than 200, creating a formidable challenge for making product comparisons and evaluations. How many of these vendors will it take for you to get the control you need but avoid a vendor-management and integration meltdown?

That, of course, is the $40,000 question.

RIM Plus One, Two or Three

At this stage, it's highly unlikely you can get away with just one MDM supplier unless you run a traditional BlackBerry-only environment that you manage and secure with Research In Motion's BlackBerry Enterprise Server. But as other devices enter the enterprise, whether you'll need one, two, three or possibly more other MDM suppliers depends on a number of considerations.

Among them:

  • Feb6TNWireless-Sidebar.jpgYour company size and diversity of mobile employees. Knowledge workers, warehouse workers, field service workers and retail floor workers, for example, might require different devices running different mobile operating systems.
  • Your policies about employees using personal devices at work. This affects how many mobile OSs you'll need to manage and how many you'll expect your help desk to support.
  • The access control capabilities of your Wi-Fi vendor
  • Whether you are seeking to integrate management of your wireless and cabled networks
  • The full feature set you require (see sidebar for MDM's primary elements)
  • The future of BlackBerry in your enterprise
  • What MDM partnerships and acquisitions occur in the coming 12 to 24 months

The broad-brush answer to the thorny question of "how many MDM vendors?" at this moment is, "RIM plus at least one more MDM vendor." The second supplier would cover management and security of non-BlackBerry devices. But to get all the features and OS support you want, just one more vendor might not be enough.

Note that RIM is planning to ship its own multi-OS MDM server sometime this quarter. Whether the solution, dubbed BlackBerry Mobile Fusion, will usurp the need for all others has yet to be seen. But it's unlikely.

The reason is that Fusion, initially, supports just RIM BlackBerry, Apple iOS and Google Android mobile OSs. While iOS and Android are becoming dominant mainstream mobile OSs, there are lots of others out there today, too. Among them: Symbian, Windows Phone, Windows Mobile, Windows CE, webOS and proprietary OSs for customized vertical devices. If they enter your environment, you'll need to manage them.

If all this sounds paralyzing, it's understandable. The MDM market is maturing quickly, but is fragmented, with each solution emphasizing certain functions more than others.

The Wi-Fi Factor

Further fueling the complexity is that many Wi-Fi vendors are eager to be associated with solving the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) problem. When users are in the office, they will likely be on your internal Wi-Fi network for cost savings and capacity reasons, so the Wi-Fi companies have a filtering role to play.

Several enterprise-class Wi-Fi vendors' management systems can identify the type of device trying to access the Wi-Fi network, classify it and apply policies as to whether it gets full, partial or no access to the enterprise WLAN. That's all good; however, the Wi-Fi vendors don't address other critical parts of MDM, such as how to develop, distribute and manage mobile applications. They also don't encrypt files on mobile devices, and they don't remotely wipe devices.

More comprehensive MDM vendors that do perform these necessary functions often also offer access control akin to what the Wi-Fi vendors offer. So do you need to activate the capabilities both in your Wi-Fi management system and in your MDM system?

The Wi-Fi vendors don't require putting a client agent on each user's device, which is appealing, particularly for user-owned devices. But it's probably not adequate, says Chris Hazelton, research director of mobile and wireless at 451 Group.

"Without [an MDM agent], you can't control distribution of applications or even whitelist and blacklist them," he notes.

So it's likely that the MDM near-term future remains ripe for partnership, acquisition and consolidation. And we have yet to see MDM standards, which could go a long way in streamlining mobility management and paring down the number of needed systems.

As the director of IT infrastructure at a nationwide realty company recently commented in a community chat room: "The Android and Microsoft mobile worlds [alone] are so fractured, the support of each device and manufacturer nuance could cripple an IT department. Standards are critical to IT support costs and service levels."

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