In the age of smartphones and tablets, managed mobility services could be a goldmine for IT service providers with customers in need of mobile device management.
By Ellen Muraskin
In the mobility gold rush of today’s IT marketplace, some prospectors have struck a vein in mobile device management. MDM platform vendors, managed service providers, and resellers are all finding profit in helping businesses get a grip on an entirely new security, device, billing, and management landscape.
“Many companies are beginning to understand mobility, but don’t have the IT talent they need,” says Troy Fulton, product marketing director at Tangoe Inc., a communications lifecycle management vendor with headquarters in Orange, Conn., and operations centers in more than 80 cities worldwide. Tangoe offers hosted mobile device management—in dedicated or multitenant servers—alongside a variety of communications consulting and expense management services. The company also remotely manages MDM platforms installed behind a customer’s firewall.
Such services are gaining popularity. Even businesses in highly regulated industries like banking and healthcare are increasingly receptive to outsourced MDM offerings, according to Brian Reed, chief marketing and chief product officer at BoxTone, a provider of mobility management software and services based in Columbia, Md. As evidence, Reed notes that the service provider segment of BoxTone’s business grew 300 percent last year.
Like comparable services, BoxTone offers self-serve functionality for a range of day-to-day needs, such as enrolling new devices. Companies can also apply usage policies automatically based on group or individual profiles in Active Directory. Well over half of all remote wipes, in which data on a lost or stolen device is erased, are triggered automatically, Reed says, though end users and IT managers can also manually issue wipe commands or use GPS technology to locate a missing device.
Channel pros can tap into the rise of managed mobility in multiple ways, ranging from offering third-party hosted MDM solutions on a “white label” basis to becoming full-blown providers of managed mobility services themselves, with round-the-clock response to automated alerts and customer calls.
Reed, not surprisingly, advises most solution providers and MSPs to partner with an experienced provider like BoxTone. “You wouldn’t set up a 24-hour service bureau for three customers,” he says. “The bigger guys have call centers all around the world, and can be more cost competitive.”
Reed and Fulton both see MDM consulting as a potentially rich opportunity for channel pros. Services like BoxTone enable companies to enforce usage policies with fine-grained precision, and most businesses need help designing such rules from an IT provider.
What, for example, should happen if a hosted MDM platform detects telltale signs that an employee’s tablet has been lost? Alert the user? Alert IT? Disable the device? Delete its corporate data? One answer may be suitable for the sales force but entirely inappropriate for senior executives, Reed notes. Helping SMBs navigate such questions is a valuable service that channel pros are well qualified to provide.
