Does Mobile Device Management deliver enterprise value?
Posted by Ron van Valkengoed
Telecom Expense Management and Mobile Device Management: a powerful combination
There is a lot of talk about Mobile Device Management (MDM) and its big promise to enterprises of centrally distributing applications, data and configuration settings to mobile devices. MDM services have incredible potential and deliver great value to IT department as it provides centralized application and hardware resource control. The control is effected by remote or over-the-air capabilities. It helps IT departments to optimize functionality and security and minimize (support) cost and downtime.
So yes it provides great value but does this all sound too good to be true? To a certain extend it does as there are some important “challenges” to overcome before MDM will be ready for mass market adoption. The current high Total Cost of Ownership being a very important one, as enterprises will be hesitant to pay a high monthly cost per user/device. Also the user Experience is not always positive…..battery drains, difficult to set-up, device locks,…etc. And what about keeping up with the ever changing landscape of Device Operating Systems and Device (Configurations).
It will take time and hard work from many market players to overcome the challenges, also because the MDM market is still relatively untested and uneducated.. For the near future I expect Telecom Expense Management (TEM) Services to be combined with MDM. It will provide a powerful combination and provides strong value to IT department as it finally offers:
- Real time cost control – enabling controlling costs when they are actually made –
- Policy management…..e.g. block 0800 service numbers, this roaming call cost $4.25, automatic selection of preferred network, white and black list of applications etc.
- Fully automated Asset and Inventory Management and more real-time insight…..which user is using how much mobile data with which application, what are the most used applications.
Over time TEM and MDM will be an integrated offer and provides a powerful combination making life easier for enterprise IT departments to control cost and improve service management.
Hi,
This is an interesting article. MDM is quite the trend.
I had a query related to another trend in enterprises – moving from the enterprise led instrument to a employee led instrument. Thus IT would need to be able to support more types of devices but their knowledge per individual device need not be very high. What kind of an MDM solution do you see in such an environment? Will it be as muscular a service as in an enterprise led ecosystem?
The moment an enterprise allows for more types of devices then indeed the knowledge needed per device becomes very high as often a lot of end user questions are around device functionality or settings, typically an operator has the support structure for addressing these questions. In case the issues is more around keeping the device secure in line with the enterprise requirement or providing operational support then the larger MDM suppliers will be able to support this trend as they have the engineering resource to ensure their tooling keeps working with all these different environments.
Will it become as muscular….unfortunately yes. Employee-led typically means that novice end users are trying to keep their service going and spend a lot of time and energy in doing so….this is an enormous productivity loss. It is better for the enterprise to provide the right support infrastructure.