Recent Updates Page 10

Unknown's avatar Pete 5:26 am on October 23, 2013  

To improve is t…

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.
Winston Churchill

I recently started a new job at a company, well to be honest I have bitched about for some time.  They were in the space that I grew to love, a company that I admired from the dark corners of the internet for years.   There comes a time in every man’s life when you have to try to make a change to get to that next level, I loved my old job, and everything they did for me, but it wasn’t for meanymore.   Let’s see where this adventure brings me….

Unknown's avatar Pete 5:26 am on July 28, 2013
Tags: , Good,   

The Good lawsuit

 

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Sometimes I rant about how much I hate Airwatch, they hire kids that are 21 or 22 years old, they under pay their employees, they put features in the product just to check something off for the Gartner report. ( I still feel that way sometimes)  However, this is a really weak lawsuit.  I dislike when technology companies attempt to patten an idea.  That is basically what Good is trying to do here. 

Nowhere in any of Airwatche’s code will you find anything, that even remotely resembles Good code.  Good is suing over the belief that Airwatch (and Mobile Iron for that matter) stole the idea from them (and did it better then they did).  This is such a ridiculous concept in technology and all it does is hurt innovation.  I don’t care if Good thought up this MDM game 10 years ago, Androids and iPhones didn’t even exist back then. There is no argument for attempting to say that your patten, that applied to some old WinMO devices and Symbian devices, is valid today in the technology diverse systems that we are working in.  Just think about this for a second, if this nonsensical patten crap existed 100 years ago, people would of been afraid to invent anything.

Unknown's avatar Pete 7:12 pm on July 27, 2013
Tags: Cloud, , SaaS, VPN   

SaaS versus On-Premise solutions

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So recently I had my galbladder out, so I didn’t have as much time to write, or work for that matter.  I came back to my job to see that I had close to 4000 emails.  Err…  I can assure you that this is a very fun process of going through e-mails…or not.  What I wanted to talk about today is  what most people in the MDM space have seen happening over the past few years.  When setting up MDM/ or any application or service that can go in the cloud, you are going to have to deal with a decision.  Do we want it behind our firewall, or do you want it out in the cloud.  Do we want it here, or do we want to use a SaaS (Software as a service) or a  connector to get to that machine.  I am going to attempt to explain the differences here.  Now Obviously I assume you are going to have a whole team of network engineers, software engineers and really smart people who have put much more thought into this then you, this is just some basics.

 

On-Premise

The general concept behind on-premise is that you want to have control of the system.  You want to be able to patch it, you want to have it on your hardware, you do not want someone to have control over its SLA’s (service delivery times) In other words You want to control the success of it.

 

Hosted/SaaS/Cloud

In this situation, you use some sort of VPN or connector to connect your corporate environment out to a cloud solution.  In this case, you are saying that you do not want to have to deal with patching this, dealing with its up time, the only part of the equation that you are responsible for is the connection via the VPN or SaaS. 

Unknown's avatar Pete 5:07 pm on June 26, 2013  

Application management is the future

Lately I have been dealing with more and more requests to do application management. I am starting to think that enterprise mobile IT is starting to become just enterprise mobile application management

Unknown's avatar Pete 2:34 pm on May 27, 2013
Tags:   

“At the very co…

“At the very core of RIM – at its DNA – is the innovation. We always think ahead. We always think forward. We sometimes think the unthinkable.”

This was a quote by the current CEO of RIM, Thorsten Heins.  I wonder if he regrets these words.  They were outpaced and outmatched by Apple, Android and even to an extent Microsoft.  I wonder if they had played nice, where they would be now.

 

We’ll see how people take to the new 10 series of phones.

Unknown's avatar Pete 11:34 pm on May 26, 2013  

Why Microsoft doesn’t care about the MDM race

Activesync

Lately I’ve been asked plenty of questions about the MDM sector, but it seems to be one overwhelming question that everyone seems to ask..

Why doesn’t Microsoft come out with an MDM solution?

Generally I tell people that the MDM push is just helping Microsoft push the technology that they ultimately care about, ActiveSync.  If you look at all the MDM solutions, except for Good, they all get e-mail via ActiveSync.  Even BlackBerry with BES 10, makes all the new devices push through ActiveSync.  So the more MDM solutions, the more companies push ActiveSync, the more Microsoft sells Exchange license’s, Window’s license’s and keeping the Microsoft name prevalent .  I want to clarify, I still think that Microsoft wants to stay in the Mobile software/hardware game, see Windows Phone 8, however, having the most widely used application for e-mail is a nice side gig.  As long as everyone still uses Exchange as a back end, people will need mobile e-mail, and they will utilize ActiveSync until further notice.

Sometimes I wish Microsoft would just buy up 2 or 3 of the big MDM providers, because I feel some of the smaller companies are running sort of a Mickey Mouse operation

Unknown's avatar Pete 3:07 pm on May 23, 2013
Tags: , Mobile, TEM   

Where does MDM start and TEM end?

I’ve been working on trying to explain where mobile device management starts, and how companies use this service.  I figured this was a worthy blog topic, as it is something that until recently I got wrong.

First let me show this art picture I just made that will help clarify how I break down typical MDM/TEM

mdmtem1

TEM stands for telecom expense management, this is the process in which you provision the phone.  This is when you set up data, voice, make a phone selection (Android/BlackBerry/IPhone etc:)  Now some companies can handle this entire process, you basically let them pay the bill for you, and they will handle the entire procurement for you.  But that is when MDM ( in the traditional sense) begins.  MDM manages the user experience when they have the phone.  It is responsible for helping the user set up e-mail, get applications, set up security policies and monitor the device.  The advantage to having someone to both TEM and MDM is they can manage the entire life-cycle.  Customers are going to want someone who can make the entire point to point solution, they don’t want to have to deal with TEM people, or MDM people, they want to deal with mobility people.  I think once we figure out that piece of the puzzle, one company who can truly do it both, they will own the entire market.  Although some companies do this now, they are not known enough for it, and they do not do it on a constant enough basis.

 

 

Unknown's avatar Pete 2:58 pm on May 21, 2013
Tags: enterprise company, Fiori, google, HTML5, , SAP   

Google announces partnership with SAP for Fiori

SAP_Sapphire

 

“We’re announcing a new relationship between SAP and Google, to help our products provide beautiful experiences to our users and to make our platforms work better for our developers,” said Singh at SAP’s Sapphire conference in Orlando this week.  Google is pushing the enterprise level application market hard, and this is just the next step in what it see’s as the evolution on Android enterprise solutions.  With BlackBerry 10 being the standard for HTML 5 applications right now, although not being picked up by…well anyone, it is interesting to see a huge player like Google set up a platform for HTML 5 development.

“SAP Fiori is a beautiful HTML5 platform to use to build apps from the ground up around users’ experiences that are optimized for Chrome. Chrome is the most secure, fast and modern browser on the internet,” he said. “As a consumer enterprise company we’ve found a great partner in SAP to bring the same kind of simplicity and beauty you have in the consumer world to applications for things like supply chain, finance and retail.”

Hey Apple,

What you got in store for us for HTML5?

 

Unknown's avatar Pete 10:35 am on May 20, 2013
Tags: , , BlackBerry world,   

Where have all the MDM providers gone?

sponsors1 sponsors2 Sponsors3

Looking at BlackBerry world news, I stumbled upon an interesting fact.  The sponsor list strangely had something missing.  This is an impressive list of sponsors, but once you drill down into the list, what is missing…

Where are all the MDM providers?  It seems that the only companies on this list that are MDM providers are Boxtone and Vox Mobile.   Those two companies are more BlackBerry centric then the others.  Now some companies have an MDM solution, like SAP, but they are hardly there for the MDM part of the business.   This leads me to one conclusion.

Either RIM told Mobile Iron, Airwatch, Zenprise and Tangoe MDM to stay away or those companies decided that they did not need to be seen at BlackBerry live.  Each of these scenario’s provides insight into what is going on in the battle for MDM.  The Gardner report on MDM is due soon, and we are going to see what has happen since last year’s report put Airwatch and MobileIron on top of the pile.

Unknown's avatar Pete 9:54 am on May 19, 2013  

Where do we go from here?

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Recently I have been in London working on teaching people from our other office about the power of mdm. It is fascinating to see how other cultures perceive how the mobile market is emerging . For example I had the pleasure of speaking to some executives from this office and I learned some interesting facts.

* most mobile enterprise phones in the UK are not smartphones
* most enterprise users carry two phones because tax issues make it impossible to do personal calls on your work phone
* BYOD has not taken off in the traditional sense. Data is so much more expensive over here that people commonly switch phones between carriers for voice and data. (some companies advertise on how easy it is, and design apps around it, even carriers!)
* mdm might have more play in the USA then England due to data rates.