The news about enterprise mobility just keeps coming in.
But in the context of our recently-announced shift towards embedded app stores, one piece of recent news is of particular interest to us.
According to a new Gartner report, described in detail by ComputerWorld early last month, a greater number of employees and contractors are using their own (non-employer owned) devices in the workplace–which has led to an increase in companies seeking out MAM solutions to manage applications on those devices.
By 2021, Gartner predicts that 60% of enterprise apps “will rely on at least one app-level management control.” Translated: companies will, according to Gartner, grow to rely more on app-level management and less on broad-scale EMM solutions that cover the full spectrum.
The benefit of this approach, of course, is that MAM doesn’t require devices to be company-owned in order to manage apps. (Some would argue that embracing unmanaged devices is key in today’s world, where chances are good that employees have their own suite of devices–outside of what the company would typically provide.) MAM solutions are often cheaper than their full-blown EMM cousins, too.
In a way, the recent growth of MAM indicated by Gartner is a bit of a return to the old standard. The enterprise started as a wild west of devices and applications, then MAM came along and provided some order and management for companies, and then EMM came along and promised a more complete picture of application and device usage in the enterprise. The difference now, as we hinted at above, is that employee-owned device growth has far exceeded anyone’s expectations, making EMM tedious.
And, as we’ve mentioned here on our blog before, the ways in which employees are using applications are different than most people expected, too. Just as companies pictured a perfect world in which they could manage every variable on company-owned devices in the workplace, so too did many (us included) predict a future in which enterprises all had their own tailor-made apps to accomplish any number of complicated tasks. The reality is that many employees rely on their own devices to get work done, and, rather than using those tailor-made apps, they’re using consumer applications to get work done and be more productive.
In the context of what we’ve been talking about here on our blog lately, this change described by Gartner–an uptick in MAM and unmanaged devices–fits perfectly with what we see as the best route forward for App47. The future, as we’ve said, is not in traditional EMM or mobile application development, but in embedded app stores.
At the end of the day, everyone’s reaction to this paradigm shift is going to be different. App47, for one, is excited to embrace a new future and standard for app usage and development–even if it means a slight shift from what we’ve done in the past.
