Samsung mobile devices, especially its smartphones and tablets, are hot in both enterprise and consumer markets. For enterprises, managing all these devices is creating quite a challenge.
Samsung just partnered with mobile management provider DMI to offer managed mobility services that support Samsung devices.
“Until recently, many large enterprises have relied on legacy devices and technologies to address their security concerns. Today, end users have made it abundantly clear that they prefer Android and especially Samsung devices. The dramatic mobile security enhancements made by Samsung, along with our services, will make Samsung the technology of choice, for both end users and enterprises,” said Jay Sunny Bajaj, DMI founder and CEO of DMI.
DMI’s role is to help install and manage Samsung Enterprise Services, which is a set of services and devices for large customers. These BYOD-focused programs include, the partners said:
-“Migration Services
-Staging/Kitting/Device Configuration/Device Implementation Services
-Mobile Device Management (MDM) Implementation
-End User Help Desk
-and Security Assessments and Professional Services”
DMI is acting as a bit of a proxy for Samsung. “DMI will implement and manage certain Samsung security solutions and platforms, including Samsung Knox, for enterprise and government customers. Knox enhances Android security with hardware-based integrity monitoring, secure container technology to separate personal and business apps, Smart Card authentication including Common Access Card (CAC), app level integrity management and expanded MDM policy enforcement,” the pair said.
DMI and MMS
DMI is in the managed mobility services (MMS) market, a relatively new term, and manages more than a half million mobile devices. Meanwhile, most of us are more familiar Mobile Device Management (MDM).
Gartner recently did a Magic Quadrant analysis of MMS, and not a single vendor made it into the leader’s portion of the quadrant. Instead all 18 vendors profiled were clustered in the niche and visionary squares.
The distinction between MDM and MMS is a bit subtle. Judge for yourself as here is how Gartner defines MMS. “Managed mobility services (MMS) encompass the IT and process services provided by an external service provider (ESP) that are required to: plan, procure, provision, activate, manage and support mobile devices, network services and mobile applications. For this Magic Quadrant, devices include smartphones, tablets and point of service (POS) equipment and the focus is weighted toward the management and support of corporate-owned devices. However, MMS include IT and process services and systems in support of bring your own device (BYOD) practices.”
And here is how Gartner sees MDM. “Enterprise mobile device management (MDM) software is: (1) a policy and configuration management tool for mobile handheld devices (smartphones and tablets based on smartphone OSs), and (2) an enterprise mobile solution for securing and enabling enterprise users and content. It helps enterprises manage the transition to a more complex mobile computing and communications environment by supporting security, network services, and software and hardware management across multiple OS platforms and now sometimes laptop and ultrabooks. This is especially important as bring your own device (BYOD) initiatives and advanced wireless computing becomes the focus of many enterprises. MDM can support corporate-owned as well as personal devices, and helps support a more complex and heterogeneous environment.”
The key difference, it seems, is who offers the services. MMS is clearly a set of services. MDM is a tool that can be used by IT or a service provider. When MDM is offered as a service, does it become MMS?
The Near Magic of DMI
Gartner sees DMI as entirely devoted to MMS. “The company focuses exclusively on mobility solutions for the enterprise, spanning devices, applications and business processes. Gartner estimates that DMI manages approximately 500,000 devices, with 24 percent of those devices residing outside of North America,” the research house says.
Plus Gartner believes DMI’s wide selection of tools is a plus. These include “project-based consulting, custom mobile application development and training services to annuity agreements for incident management and release management.”
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
