“bring your own device” and the importance of app management
I had the pleasure yesterday of participating on a panel at the SIIA “All About Mobile Conference”. The leading device and app management vendors were there. This included Sybase (which has long sold the Afaria device management solution), Apperian (which provides app management for iPhones and iPhone apps) and us (we provide RhoGallery, the first hosted app management product). As everyone recognized, the long predicted “Bring Your Own Device” movement is real now. Enterprises are providing per diems and reimbursement for employees running their own smartphones. Part of the savings for the enterprise is that they don’t have to purchase devices for employees. But an even bigger part of the ROI of this decision is removing responsibility for MANAGING devices.
So what does this mean for enterprise IT staff (administrators and developers) wanting to provide order to the chaos of getting the right apps out to the right people in their organization? Using a full-fledged mobile device management solution is now both overkill and probably not going to work anyway. Part of the appeal to employees of BYOD is that they control their device. And to IT it is the avoidance of owning the ongoing maintenace of those devices. But there still needs to be some way of making it easy to get apps out to users. And control the availability of enterprise apps and data when devices are lost or employees are terminated.
The solution is APP MANAGEMENT not device management. This new lighter weight simpler approach also coincides with big shifts in how apps are made available. The app management solution should handle apps being made available with Apple’s enterprise distribution server (which is now available to enterprises of all sizes not just large companies). It also should be available in a hosted Software as a Service model.
The first product that meets these criteria (even just hosted app management) is Rhomobile’s RhoGallery service. RhoGallery lets administrators define “galleries” of apps (whether or not those apps are written with Rhodes or RhoHub). They can be app executables that are uploaded or just links to URLs of external apps (including those on an enterprise’s Apple iOs enterprise distribution server).
They invite groups of users to those galleries via email or SMS. The user then has all of the apps that they need to do their job from a single “launchpad” app. As new apps are added to the Galllery the user sees them appear on their device. If it is desired to remove a user from access to an app or data, those changes are pushed out as well.
We think RhoGallery represents the first of a new breed of lightweight mobile app management that will get far more adoption than earlier device management software ever did, both due to cost and difficulty of deployment and the new realities of enterprise device usage that make full device management less relevant.
