Mobile Managed Services: Getting Started and Getting it Right

By Lori Castle, Editor
With the increasing adoption of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies in the enterprise, successfully managing this wide variety of mobile devices is quickly becoming a significant challenge for IT departments of all sizes.

Many companies already turn to managed services to meet other business needs, so counting on a third party provider for mobile managed services (MMS) makes sense. In this report, "Mobile Managed Services: Getting Started and Getting it Right," from the Mobile Enterprise Thought Leadership Series, this fast growing trend is examined.

Creating the Right Strategy
Experts agree, any mobile deployment needs to be looked at holistically, as a way of extending a company’s established business processes into the mobile environment, and creating the best MMS strategy and selecting the right partner can mean the difference between a short-term fix and business transformation.

Adoption Rates from VDC Research
A recent survey by VDC Research found that while only 14.5% of companies have implemented an enterprise mobile app store as a managed service, that percentage is anticipated to triple within the next 2 years.
 
Similarly, the research firm predicts that MDM adoption will grow to 55.4% over the next two years, and adoption of mobile security as a managed service will grow to 53.4%.

David Krebs, vice president of mobile and wireless at VDC Research, says one key driver behind the growth of MMS is the relatively limited ability of current IT staff to manage mobile assets and mobile solutions, compared to other IT assets. “It’s considerably lower in terms of what they’re not only comfortable doing, but capable of supporting. They just don’t have the internal resources, nor the internal know how, to effectively manage what is becoming a really complex and fragmented space,” he says.

For those companies that do decide to move forward, Krebs says, key areas to consider in selecting a provider include, of course, the company’s track record and pricing model – as well as, significantly, the company’s ability to customize a solution to match the requirements of the customer. “With mobility, we’re still seeing today there really aren’t out-of-the-box solutions, and I think end users are still looking for something that’s designed to meet their very specific needs,” he says.

Topics included in this report:

• A Complex and Fragmented Space
• Managing a Changing Mobile Environment
• Enabling Business Transformation
• Selecting a Managed Services Provider
• Developing a Mobile Strategy
• Integrating the Solution