Mobile Device Management - what are you doing?
by Volker Weber
I am writing a report about MDM this week, and I am interested in what you are doing out there. Which product are you using, and what are you doing with it. Send me an email please. Natürlich auch auf Deutsch. :-)
Update: Excellent feedback so far. Thank you, guys.
Comments
I won't write an email, but a comment in English ...
Having done some research on this, I think the market for MDM solutions is quite intransparent. It may not be an issue for a company with a somewhat homogenous environment and several hundreds or thousands of devices. However, it seems that the topic is a difficult one for smaller shops (20+ devices or even significantly less). It is a misconception that those do not need MDM. Often, you have BYOD policies there and the IT dept is "outsourced" to a service provider, who also is expected to take care about connecting the mobile devices and cannot do this by connecting them to the iPhone Configuration Utility or - even worse - by getting hands on the devices.
In a BlackBerry environment, they are well served by BES Express. Looking at some of my customers (some with BYOD) people start to bring in or demand iPhones, iPads, Androids, etc. If you are not able to get your hand on these, they are a PITA to configure, especially if you are confronted with users who do not want to be part of the configuration process.
So, my requirement would be a MDM solution which is able to service iDevices and Androids. Of course, those solutions exist. However, up to now I have failed to find something which is economically viable for smaller shops. I know the numbers for Afaria, but several vendors just say "Call sales" on their website, which is a signal that we are not talking about a commodity here, neither from the perspective of the price tag nor from the effort involved.
A Mac mini with OS X Server does the job for iDevices, but not for Android. Other iOS MDM solutions seem to come with high upfront costs. For many of the solutions you even need a iOS Enterprise Developer account. For Android, it does not look better. The Nitrosdesk (Touchdown) website lists 13 MDM solutions with nice websites but no simple "buy" button.
So my questions would be: Are there "commodity-like" or "off-the-shelf" solutions in the MDM market? If not, where is the issue?
What are you doing? - Testing and just wondering about the results ...
In full disclosure I work for Fiberlink, an MDM vendor. I wanted to comment on your line about costs. MaaS360 is economical to the SMB market and scales for the Fortune 200. It's possible because it's Cloud-Based.
As a side note, if someone like you wanted to try it for free, you could do so right off our public website without the need to even talk to a sales person! It's an instant, on-demand MDM solution. MDM is not a complex solution to get moving on.
We're currently very happy with the products developed by Midpoints (iOS.profiler & traveler.rules) They integrate seamlessly in our Lotus Domino and Traveler infrastructure and work just great.
