Mobile Security and Application Ecosystems in Flux

K. Weldon

Summary Bullets:

• Managed mobility services for TEM/MDM are maturing and commoditizing, and the ecosystem of vendors partnering with carries and SIs has settled down to a handful of leading platforms.
• Now that mobile apps and mobile security are leading opportunities for service providers, they may once again have to pick the right partners, this time from a complex set of vendors which each approaches the market differently.

Mobile operators and IT service providers have been offering managed mobility services for several years, but the set of services is expanding.  While TEM (and associated logistics for ordering and provisioning devices and services) and MDM were the primary offers, there is currently a focus on new services for mobile application development and management and for mobile security.  On the application development side, while carriers had initially made partnerships for mobile enterprise application (MEAP) services using the platforms of vendors such as Antenna Software and SAP/Sybase, there is now a broader ecosystem of vendors that offer development tools, pre-written mobile apps, and enhanced enterprise app stores.  Mobile application management (MAM) is also a relatively new category, offering ongoing lifecycle management and usage analysis/optimization of mobile apps once they have been deployed.  On the security side, application-level security (also called ‘app wrapping’) is being offered as an alternative or complement to device, network, and perimeter security options to safe-guard data accessed from or resident on mobile devices.  There have also been a number of recent acquisitions that will affect the choices of vendors made directly by enterprise buyers and by service providers.