Microsoft Positioned As “Visionary” In The Magic Quadrant For Enterprise Mobility Management Suites

Enterprise mobility management (EMM) suites help organizations integrate mobile devices into their security frameworks and systems and information technology life cycles. Gartner recently released their Magic Quadrant report on Enterprise mobility management suites. This is the first year Microsoft has been included in the EMM Magic Quadrant and it was positioned in Visionary Quadrant.

From Gartner’s report,

Microsoft

Microsoft’s EMM product is the Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS), which includes Microsoft Intune, Azure Active Directory Premium and Azure Rights Management. Microsoft Intune provides the core EMM capabilities of MDM and MAM. Intune’s strengths are its support of Office 365 and integration of System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr). Microsoft also recently developed a secure PIM capability based on the Outlook mobile app for iOS and Android. This will rival secure PIM offerings available from other EMM vendors. While the end-user functionality of the Outlook mobile app looks compelling, it was not generally available at the time of this report. The EMS represents a comprehensive mobility security and management vision, and it positions Microsoft well for the future in this market. Currently, Intune adoption is low, and the product is still maturing. Organizations that should consider Intune are those that want to extend the Office 365 services to mobile devices and ConfigMgr customers that value client management and EMM integration over best-of-breed EMM functionality.

Strengths

• Intune has unique technical capabilities to manage the Office Mobile apps on iOS and Android devices, including “conditional access,” app-level authentication and copy/paste control.
• The Intune license includes entitlement to ConfigMgr, allowing organizations to manage PCs and mobile devices through the same license and console.
• The combination of Azure Active Directory Premium, Azure Rights Management and Intune addresses some useful mobile scenarios, for example, changing an Active Directory password from a mobile device.

Cautions

• Intune has two modes: “standalone” and “hybrid” with ConfigMgr. The “hybrid” mode creates dependencies between Intune and ConfigMgr. Advanced administrative functionality requires Intune to be connected to ConfigMgr. However, new Intune functionality is not immediately available when Intune is connected to SCCM, and changes to ConfigMgr can affect its ability to work with Intune. The next major version of ConfigMgr plans to address this issue.
• Intune supports most of the generic Android MDM APIs, as well as some Samsung Knox capabilities. It does not support MDM APIs of Android for Work or other handset manufacturers (such as LG and HTC).
• Intune’s MAM has limited compatibility with third-party mobile application development tools, and it is behind most competitive products on containerization and analytics features.

Read more about Microsoft’s take on EMM here.

Source: Gartner