There’s a half-truth blazing its way through the enterprise mobility marketplace. Organizations are being told, by vendors who are at best uninformed and at worst being dishonest, that having an app store means you have MAM.
This deception needs to end, now.
Mobile application management is not merely the standing up of a customized app store, advantageous as that may be. Mobile application management is a systems-management view of enterprise mobile apps. It encompasses deployment, configuration, monitoring, management, and security.
Any vendor who claims to provide MAM and offers anything less than addressing every aspect of the enterprise mobile app lifecycle is presenting an incomplete solution. The consequences for those customers are going to include tremendous additional time and expense to get the real mobile app management they need, compounded by the inevitable frustration and delay of managing multiple vendors needed to address the entire lifecycle.
That integration aspect, for us, is the real bait-and-switch. The enterprise is excited about app stores. Companies understand the benefits, and when they come online, they think “great, I’ve got MAM.” Soon after, however, comes the realization that beyond distribution, they need to manage versions, monitor performance, ensure security — in short, all the aspects of an enterprise mobile app that contribute to that app’s organizational ROI. Every vendor you add to that dynamic, means more incompatibility issues, increased miscommunication, misaligned objectives — all arising from an initial vendor who claimed MAM begins and ends with the app store.
This cycle is, unfortunately, somewhat typical. We find new technology. We like it. We deploy it. And then we realize we can’t support it. Cue the scramble to find contractors and cobble together a solution.
As advocates of true Mobile Application Management, of MAM that accounts for every aspect of the enterprise mobility lifecycle, this makes us more than a measure upset. We’ve been committed to implementing (and explaining) the totality of MAM for two years. When it gets misdefined and misapplied by others in our space, it does the entire strategy a disservice.
And don’t get us started on outfits who simultaneously sell this cut-rate MAM capability while charging twice per user what we do. Madness.
In an article from Mobile Enterprise last month, our friend Philippe Winthrop offered an excellent explanation of how Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM), in its ideal form, should look:
“I see a model that extends well beyond the reactive nature of EMM to one that proactively takes on all facets of technology to ensure that the business can truly be mobile. To me, that is a mobile platform — not just one mobile operating system (or two), or one app or one backend system, but being able to access all the backend data your company needs via amazing mobile applications (that your company has built) on an employee’s device(s) of choice thereby making them that much more productive regardless of time or location, all while ensuring that the corporate data is secured.”
If you’re not addressing each of those aspects, you’re not even close to real MAM.
To codify our complete explanation of MAM, we’ll be putting out an eBook soon that explains our definition in detail within the next month. If, in the meantime, you hear from someone who says they can deliver MAM, and then proceeds to tell you all you need is an app store — please talk to us first. You can call collect.
