The Changing Device Management Landscape

Over the years, many corporations have made significant investments in products to enable their helpdesk and Information Service (IS) personnel to comprehensively maintain and manage their enterprise resources, including servers, desktops, laptops, applications, and networks. The purpose of these management products is to ensure that enterprise resources are available for use, can be updated as necessary, and that helpdesk personnel can troubleshoot, diagnose, and repair machines in remote locations. Typical features for management of servers, laptops, and desktops can include asset hardware/software reporting, automated provisioning of updates, and interactive tools such as "remote control."

Managing the disconnect

The advent of sophisticated mobile devices, such as the Windows Mobile Smartphone and Pocket PC, has added a new element into the enterprise and a unique set of management requirements. While these devices can enable mobile workers to remotely access e-mail and mission critical line-of-business applications such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and Field Service applications; their available memory, computing horsepower, and battery life are constrained. Unlike desktops and servers on corporate networks, these devices are often remotely connected to the enterprise by a variety of wired and wireless connections. These remote connections may not always be available and may be slow due to limited bandwidth or network congestion. The distributed nature of these devices, combined with their mission critical use, makes the enterprise requirements for their management even greater.

In the past, software companies have dealt with these management challenges with proprietary, stand-alone products. These products utilize client software on the mobile device that is designed to communicate only with their own enterprise console and server. Often not uniquely designed around the constraints of mobile devices, the client software negatively impacts the performance of the device for the mobile user by consuming significant amounts of the device's memory, computing, and power resources. Moreover, because these products are also designed to support less sophisticated mobile device platforms, their management feature set for Windows Mobile devices is constrained to the capabilities of the least sophisticated mobile device platform, eliminating critical features such as live, interactive remote control.

Leveraging standardization

Today, rather than investing in stand-alone, proprietary mobile device management products, leading companies are looking to leverage their significant investments in enterprise management products to also manage their Windows Mobile Smartphone and Pocket PC devices. While some of these leading enterprise management software providers have recently made incremental enhancements to their products' support of Windows Mobile devices, the feature set needed to comprehensively meet enterprise management requirements for these devices is still largely unmet.

The good news, however, is that many of the leading enterprise management software providers have included open standards-based communications interfaces to their management consoles and servers (such as support for XML SOAP Web Services) so that other third-party software companies can integrate their own value-added functionality directly into these products.

Consolidated tools

Executed correctly, a third-party on-device management agent can directly leverage the inherent enterprise security, scalability, and reliability of the enterprise management product. The on-device agent communicates directly with the enterprise management product's server, database, and console through these open standards-based communication protocols so that IS and helpdesk personnel can comprehensively manage their entire enterprise, including remote Windows Mobile devices, from a "single pane of glass." In this approach, it is critical that the third-party on-device agent be optimized for operation across low bandwidth or congested network connections.