Last week we published the new Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Mobile Management, Q3 2014, evaluating 15 of the vendors emerging to help organizations transform and enable their workforce with a greater set of mobile tools. 

 

Why now

We're witnessing the mobile mind shift — an expectation that workers can be productive whenever, wherever they are. There's a surge of innovation in mobile technology as a part of broader business transformation to ensure that employees have access to the information they need to better serve customers during these critical mobile moments. Technology leaders have quickly seen the value of EMM solutions to ensure that employees have safe and reliable access to mobile devices and apps.

 

Beyond MDM

Mobile device management (MDM) is the common technology used by enterprises to enable their workforce to obtain the right access on their mobile devices. However, early solutions were only able to meet companies' very basic security and management needs for mobility. As business needs mature and employees demand more data access and mobile applications, vendors are adding mobile application management (MAM), secure containers and collaboration apps, secure network gateways, and more to their MDM solutions to create more comprehensive EMM suites to address these needs. 

In addition, as mobile devices become primary work tools for more employees, organizations will look towards tools that can help them manage and secure applications across all of their devices. This is why we've started to see more integration of EMM with PC management, virtualization, and endpoint security tools from vendors and why we continue to analyze the evolving workspace market.

 

A market still in transition

The EMM market has expanded rapidly over the last few years both in terms of functionality and number of vendors and it continues to do so. Since data collection for the Wave we've seen multiple releases from many of the vendors evaluated and also seen large established technology vendors like Microsoft and CA put their stake in the ground with their own EMM products – Microsoft Intune and CA Enterprise Mobile Management. New entrants and more acquisitions will continue to push this market forward into areas like identity management, reputation, and service management while expanding capabilities to take on wearables and IoT devices. 

 

Customize the evaluation to fit your needs

Mobile enablement is critical for a passionate, productive workforce that can better serve your customers. EMM solutions will help you deliver the right application and data access to employees without jeopardizing their experience or company security.

No two companies are the same; some companies will have compliance mandates driven by their industry (e.g., Healthcare) or the countries they operate in while others might have specific job functions with drastically different needs (e.g., oil & gas workers). Each organization will have their own specific requirements so be sure check out the EMM Wave and download the detailed Wave model which gives our full analysis and lets you customize the 27 criteria weightings to help you determine which vendor will best fit your needs.

I'd love to hear what you think. Leave comments below and connect with me on Twitter (@ChristianKane) to keep the conversation going.