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milja_gillespie
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I have been working in stealth mode over the past few months, collaborating with industry experts to create new content on trends and topics that are important in the mobile industry. I am excited to introduce you to the new “Mobile Sense” thought leadership series.  Mobile Sense will be all about making sense of enterprise mobility topics, trends and issues.  We’ll introduce new topics to you on a monthly basis via whitepapers, webcasts, chats, blogs, podcasts and more.

The first whitepaper in this series is about looking beyond mobile device management to ‘Enterprise Mobility Management’ (EMM). I love the term Enterprise Mobility Management because it takes what we commonly have referred to as mobile device management (through our Afaria product) and tells the broader story of what an enterprise really needs to think about when managing and security mobile data and devices. I hope by sharing this with you that you will broaden your perspective on what you really need in your enterprise.

The paper was written by mobility expert and thought leader Philippe Winthrop of the Enterprise Mobility Foundation. In the ‘Looking Beyond Mobile Device Management to Enterprise Mobility Management’ whitepaper (link to be shared soon), Philippe discusses how over the last 18 months we’ve seen an important shift where organizations are now increasingly looking beyond just mobile email to create and deploy a wide variety of applications that connect to the organizations’ back end systems and help mobilize internal business processes. Because of this shift, IT departments also need to shift the way they look at traditional mobile device management.

Today’s highly mobile workforce faces a number of new challenges that they did not face before - most notably the greater need for information loss protection and prevention. Philippe discusses how in order to address these potential risks, IT decision makers are have been turning to “mobile device management” solutions.  The problem is that the term Mobile Device Management (MDM) is often misused and misunderstood. It is my mission to share with you how MDM and EMM are different – and why you should think about the broader requirements of EMM when considering your strategy.

I agree with Philippe that it seems that over the last year or so “Mobile Device Management is being used as an umbrella term for all things related to mobility management”.  I think we have lost focus on the important issues at hand.  When talking about “mobile device management,” we have forgotten about the broader story of enterprise mobility management. Philippe outlines that EMM is all about:

  • Mobile Inventory/Asset Management
  • Mobile Application Management
  • Mobile Security
  • Wireless Expense Management
  • Mobile Operations Management
  • Mobile Help Desk

This is a big topic, so I’ll pause and stop here for now. In my next post I’ll talk a bit more about each of the areas of EMM, and I’ll share the link to the full whitepaper.  Stay tuned for a webcast on this topic in early September where Philippe Winthrop will share his thoughts. Registration will be coming soon and I’ll share the link here.