a “front row seat” to mobile’s evolution – one of technology’s most rapidly advancing innovations. Today, Stratix’ unique perspective combines an understanding of the past with the accumulated expertise needed to anticipate the future.
In the past few weeks, Stratix has published a best practices-based informational series on how working with a MMS provider can solve mobile’s toughest challenges – including the need to support mobile users 24x7x365, while lowering mobile’s total cost of ownership.
aligned to a user’s single job. Today, mobility touches virtually everyone in the enterprise, with users having as many as 5.8 mobile devices.(1) These devices include a complex mix of corporate-owned, BYOD, consumer and rugged mobile device types, as well as multiple operating systems, device management platforms and application management systems. On “Day 2” of mobile support, a complicated array of device types, multiple types of users and various management data bombard internal support teams.
Internal IT teams depend on standards to codify technology performance at the enterprise level. For example, networking protocols such as SNMP, a common language virtually all network devices support for management, provides visibility back to a common device/asset management system. This standard ensures real-time visibility across the entire networked enterprise. Unfortunately, there is no industry standard that dictates how to provide device-level visibility across these different mobile device types.
In mobility’s non-standard world, internal teams find themselves supporting a widely diverse mix of device types, operating systems and proprietary management/visibility platforms – each with its own asset visibility and performance reporting approach.
This unfortunate result is the exact opposite of what internal teams need – a single, consolidated view of enterprise mobility in its totality.
Today, enterprises use three kinds of software tools to construct a detailed picture of the mobile ecosystem’s device universe. The first of these, asset visibility tools, is provided by each device manufacturer, while the second, telecom expense management systems (TEMS), offers information about the administrative and cost sides of device use. The third and most comprehensive, enterprise visibility systems, looks across all devices and users to deliver the information that leads to timely intervention of issues and, ultimately, enterprise insights.
To distinguish among these three approaches to mobile performance management, consider these definitions:
1. Asset visibility tools allow enterprises to determine how well mobile devices are performing. Most tools in this category are proprietary and provided by individual device manufacturers to manage their devices. Because of the number of different device manufacturers in use across the enterprise, it’s common for an enterprise to use multiple asset visibility tools, which makes easy consolidation of information from all devices into a single view virtually impossible.
2. Telecom expense management systems (TEMS) monitor and report on the administrative and financial aspects of enterprise mobile. This software typically works directly with mobile operators’ invoices to track usage, data overages and roaming charges as well as which devices are assigned to which users. Typically, TEMS monitor mobile’s total cost of ownership by ensuring all users are complying with contracted usage rates, and no active devices are “stranded” and being paid for without anyone actually using the device.