The MDM Market – Still Room for Growth in 2014

Over the past year and a half we have seen a lot of movement and heard a lot of talk about Mobile Device Management (MDM). MDM providers have expanded capabilities across all viable operating systems (iOS/Android/Windows), brought cloud features to solutions sets and have also begun to incorporate Mobile Application Management capabilities as the use of mobile enterprise applications have increased. The market has also consolidated a bit with acquisitions of pure play MDM solutions as seen with Citrix’s buying Zenprise, IBM’s purchase of Fiberlink, and VMware’s recent acquisition of AirWatch.

While a lot of the action in the MDM market has occurred on the provider end a recent article from Jon Oltsik in NetworkWorld suggests that MDM “remains elementary and immature” on the buyers end of things.  Oltsik points to research from ESG which sites that less than half (48%) of enterprise organization have implemented MDM. Based on the ESG research Oltsik writes, “In aggregate, most enterprise are just getting started or deploying products tactically at a departmental level.”

These numbers indicating an “immature” adoption of MDM are hard to argue with. Solutions Review has the opportunity to engage with many IT professionals in our community to better understand how technologies are impacting the front lines and what we hear directly from our peers is not far off from what Oltsik is asserting. Often we hear that organizations are in the “early planning stages” regarding enterprise mobility. Many are still trying to understand how to incorporate an ever growing mobile workforce into their traditional business processes. While some of our conversations do indicate “toe-dipping” in the space they also reveal that end-users are aware the roll and importance that MDM will play in their overall mobility strategies. We are constantly being told “we haven’t yet, but we know that we are going to have to bring in an MDM solutions.”

So what’s the hold up? Other than a lag in strategy and policy development Oltsik points to more ESG research which show specific reason why MDM adoption has yet to hit its peak.

• 38% say that MDM is difficult to integrate with other security technologies

• 35% say that they have experienced scalability problems with MDM as far as supporting a large number of mobile devices

• 30% say that MDM features and functionality work differently on different types of mobile devices

• 30% say that MDM is more difficult to use than they anticipated

• 29% say that they have experienced difficulty with MDM implementation

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