You know how much I like to read. I feel as if I spend half my day (a long one, at that) reading. I like to read blogs, news sites, interviews, press releases and also looking at research that is being disseminated both by my company, as well as others. Right or wrong, I don't always agree with what I see. Yesterday was such a case, when I stumbled upon this piece of research.
So technically, it's not the entire report, but even the excerpt has some things that concern me. The first page has this statement:
The entrance of Research In Motion (RIM) into the MDM space with BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) 5.0 is sure to have an impact on the market, with BlackBerry customers opting for the one-stop shop.
Uhm, am I missing something that the BES has NOT been a device management solution until then? Has it just been a tool for pushing email? Did I miss the press release from RIM that said they got into device management? I thought it was (well before 5.0) the BEST homogeneous device management platform, with over 400 policies (and now up to 450) to manage the BlackBerry. What am I missing?
Then the document goes on to define what it considers to be mobile device management. I applaud that, because you have to make sure you know what you're including (and what you're excluding) in MDM:
An MDM enterprise solution provides the standard features found in all desktop administration solutions, such as the following:
- Maintaining PC hardware and software inventories
- Performing software distribution
- Managing antivirus scan files
- Enabling remote control for systems diagnostics
With all due respect, I completely disagree with this. Although I often say that mobility must be considered another IT asset, that does not mean that it literally should be managed like every other IT asset. Do you manage server farms like a laptop? I'm not an big iron infrastructure specialist, but the point is, you need specific tools for mobile device management.
The term mobile device management gets blurred in the industry to be this umbrella term to cover most of mobility management. Mobility management is more than just devices. It's about procurement, provisioning, application management, service management, mobile security, mobile device help-desk/support, device retirement/replacement, wireless expense management AND device management.
But device management should be about the device and the device only (at least in my opinion). It includes automated device configuration, over the air updates and backup of the device (not the applications) and especially feature & functionality management (e.g., shutting down the camera).
IDC continues to see vendors add security capabilities to their device management offerings. [...]However, this trend is accelerating with the addition of backup and restore, device and/or file encryption, and application white/blacklisting.
While there's no question that mobility management companies are increasing their security chops, backup and restore and application white/blacklisting are not part of security, at least in my opinion. (Are they?) Those are part of device and application management, respectively, IMHO.
I could go on and on in terms of other issues I personally have with this piece, but I'll let you download it for yourself and let you form your own opinion. While I have great respect for the author and the company he works for, I for one believe that this document only obfuscates what is already a challenging and confusing space. Things are moving so quickly, and to the document's point, vendors are branching out in their capabilities, but let's try to keep the taxonomy straight.
Heck, I wonder if there would be a way to create a standard taxonomy so that we can all talk apples to apples as opposed to apples to oranges.
