A couple of weeks ago, the App47 team attended Enterprise Mobility Exchange 2016 in Las Vegas. EME is a who’s who of thought leaders in the enterprise mobility space, and is always a great opportunity for our team to talk to other businesses about what’s working, what isn’t, and what’s on the horizon in the industry.

We’d be here all day if we recapped everything we discussed at EME, so instead, we’ll focus on a question that resonated with a lot of people we talked to: what type of enterprise mobility user are you?

From conversations with other businesses and with clients, we laid out a spectrum of user types. Understanding the type of user you are will help you determine the best solution to meet your needs. Here’s the progression:

  • Corporate provisioned: For users of corporate provisioned devices, MDM solutions make the most sense. Mobile Device Management provides the greatest level of security. However, if the company doesn’t quite need that level of control, an independent MAM can still work perfectly.
  • Company owned, personally enabled (COPE): Again, MDM is the right solution here, as the user accepts the risk of personal data on a company owned device. Once again, however, an MAM solution can work well here, too.
  • BYOD: With BYOD, companies tell employees they have to accept the MDM profile, but like COPE, they also accept the risk associated with having their own device. MAM is a better solution, as it protects the data and/or the app(s), not just the device.
  • Third-party service provider: There’s no “best” solution here, as if you’re using a third-party service provider, you likely already have an MDM from their company.
  • Customer: Finally, the customer can look towards an app store or a device-specific solution for delivering applications outside the public app store. This is part of an MAM solution.

Many of the people we talked to understood this progression. What’s more, their businesses had often transitioned from one user type to another—often multiple times—leading up to today. As businesses mature, it’s our experience that they tend to move down the list, until ultimately settling on an MAM solution that covers all their needs.

With this laid out, we’ll ask again: what type of user are you? We talked to every type of user at EME, and it’s exciting to see businesses moving towards an MAM model and away from other solutions. If you have questions about the solution that would fit best for you or want to learn more about MAM, don’t hesitate to contact us today.