Last week, we kicked up a bit of controversy with our post, Myth Busting Mobile Application Management (MAM). The post was picked up by a few industry outlets, generating chatter that both supported and questioned our claim that MAM needs to be defined in terms of the entire enterprise mobile appdev/app management lifecycle.
This week, an additional dose of explanation, actually, justification, seemed appropriate. We really can’t take credit for this definition of MAM. It’s not like we retreated to our secret lab and then conspired to create a definition that suited our solution.
Quite the inverse, actually. Our MAM solution has been shaped by what we’ve seen in the mobile enterprise market itself. Our prospects and current customers are coming to us with the expectation that MAM encompass not merely deployment or configuration, but also monitoring, management and security.
This is their expectation, not our agenda. Yes, we brought the approach to market two years ago — basically a hunch bet that this is what it would require. Now, two years in, that hunch is being confirmed. It only makes sense that we reinforce the reality. This is what we’ve built. This is what the market is demanding as a real need for enterprise mobile app management.
At the beginning of this year, we began working with a major pharmaceutical company — a very exciting engagement for our company. But we almost missed having them as a client because their IT department was told to go and build its own mobile app management solution. They were gearing up to build and manage their own solution — from the ground up — when we connected. There was a wide-eyed moment as their IT pros absorbed our solution. “You guys have everything we were getting ready to build!” was the collective sentiment.
This is critical to understand. The transition from R&D to running IT, or managing a line of business is a big deal. Often, the folks who are asked to manage a mobile app don’t know about MAM. They don’t realize there are vendors in the space who know how to view that app from a systems management perspective.
That’s the differentiator. And that’s why our definition of MAM is the market’s definition of MAM. And that’s why we’ll keep beating our drum a little louder this year to make sure other organizations that might be scratching their heads about how they’re going to build a MAM solution will look to App47 instead.
