Welcome to Barcoding’s February Huddle! Joining me this month is SOTI’s Senior Director of Product Strategy and Sales Enablement, Mikhail Ishkanov.
Barcoding customers have long relied on SOTI to help them solve many of their most complex business-critical mobility and IoT challenges. SOTI’s customer and partner relationships provide insights into customer challenges and trending changes in the ways businesses use mobility and data. Combined with their commitment to ongoing R&D, that vision makes SOTI the market leader in new business-mobility and IoT management solutions.
Mikhail joined SOTI’s support channel more than a decade ago. There, he learned directly from customers about their challenges and from partners about solutions. In this month’s Huddle, we take a closer look at the ways mobility has revolutionized the way work gets done, and how vastly increasing capabilities and enterprise data are driving changes in mobility and IoT management.
What started as the need for company mobile device management (MDM) evolved into provisioning and ongoing monitoring and updates through enterprise mobility management (EMM)—and has now become a proactive, data-driven approach to unified endpoint management (UEM).
How did we get here, and where are we headed in mobility and IoT management for the enterprise? Buckle up, folks. It’s going to be a wild, data-driven ride!
Watch the Video!
Blazing the Trail from 50,000 Devices to More Than a Million
Knowing the locations, configurations, and status of 50,000 mobile devices is no small feat. But it pales in comparison to an enterprise system that effectively unifies all mobile and IoT devices and equipment…and then making effective use of the data all those tools capture.
Mikhail offers an example that illustrates the road from early mobile device management programs to unified endpoint management (UEM) using a customer’s mobility journey—from managing 50,000 mobile devices to unified management of more than a million devices within a single company.
Early on, when enterprise organizations recognized that mobility completely changed the way work gets done, many also recognized they needed help. MDM services helped businesses choose the right technologies and products, select suppliers that could support their needs in terms of quantities and timing, and provision those devices quickly and efficiently.
Tech Advancements Paved the Road to Enterprise Mobility Management
It’s harder every day to imagine a world without apps. From the end user’s perspective, that’s why mobile devices exist—to run applications. Think about the number of apps you use in a single workday; a device that can’t support the apps you need, or with critical apps missing or unresponsive, isn’t supporting efficiency, productivity, or accuracy.
Managing applications on devices across the enterprise was the starting point for EMM, but several factors make it more complex:
- Increasingly advanced applications
- Evolving security threats
- Exponential growth in connected devices and equipment
- Globally connected organizations
If you think of MDM as connecting digital and physical aspects of IT assets—managing devices, applications, configurations, maintenance agreements, lifecycle monitoring, etc.—then EMM improves security in that environment. Bring-your-own-device (BYOD) programs and the use of personal devices in the workplace initially drove a need for better security management, but EMM comprises far more than security.
Android Enterprise is Google’s initiative enabling better EMM through APIs and developer tools that streamline integration and support for Android OS devices.
Think about pushing updates, remote locking and wiping, segregating device data, configuring multiple user profiles on shared devices, protecting enterprise data…if MDM is about device management, then EMM is about mobility enablement. Better control over identities, access, data security, and connectivity enable uninterrupted use of all those valuable apps.
Plus, with EMM, the data those devices collect can be standardized, consolidated, and accessible from a single source to help inform data-driven business decisions. And that brings us to UEM, the current state and next step in mobility management’s evolution.
Moving Toward Unified Endpoint Management
Where EMM focuses on device security, configuration management, and applications, UEM seeks to truly unify all connected enterprise devices, including IoT-connected equipment—and then unlock the enterprise value of the data they deliver.
Proactive, data-driven decision making becomes possible as connected devices and equipment deliver data in quantities and from sources that were previously opaque. Data trends can help businesses make smarter purchasing decisions, design preventive maintenance schedules optimized to support productivity, and approach the complex needs of an enterprise with a new level of visibility.
UEM solutions like SOTI ONE allow the management, control, and tracking of any device on any platform, and deliver the data from all endpoints to a single source. It’s at once much more complex and much simpler than things were when mobility was just getting underway.
Ultimately, the value of data and technology lies in what people can do with them, and how we use them to make life better.
Strong Partnerships Give Customers One Source of Real-Time Data
Because Barcoding understands the value of data to drive enterprise growth and revolutionary business changes, we especially appreciate trusted partners like SOTI, whose solutions’ open APIs enable our customers to achieve new levels of visibility into more of their own operations.
That collaborative, partner-based approach is what Barcoding’s IntelliTrack®-SOTI integration is all about: Together, we deliver real-time access to the data customers care about most, so they can make proactive, data-driven IT asset and operational decisions.
In a fast-changing global business environment, a cooperative, collaborative partner network is a key source of enterprise strength.
Learn more about the value of an enterprise mobility security strategy and what it takes to develop one. Click here or below to download our free whitepaper and get started.
