The past 12 months has seen a continued shift toward BYOD and applications running on iOS and Android even in enterprises used to running ruggedized windows-mobile devices, said Gareth Phillips, director of APAC sales at Ontario-based SOTI.
Rather than just trying BYOD, companies today are demanding greater ROI on their BYOD strategy. Applications are also getting richer, going beyond just traditional secure email to CRM and ERP.
“All the tier one and tier two companies have a BYOD strategy, but whether their management can be called an MDM solution is up for debate,” said Phillips.
“We’re getting questions on how we can support certain applications, how we can provide remote updates and how do we collect information from the device to show how well the fleet is performing,” he said.
One good example was how one of its clients, DHL, is moving away from just Windows Mobile devices for scanning and proof of delivery to how they now manage their sales force through Android tablets.
SOTI’s solution, called Android+, is the results of collaboration with over 50 Android vendors to provide a stronger level of certification and control than what Google offers out of the box.
This also includes the ability to silently install apps and force updates without user intervention.
Meanwhile, Singapore’s Soliton Solutions has seen a surge in demand for two-factor authentication (2FA) following a recent high-profile e-government attack in Singapore. The company’s solution focuses on authentication of a user across multiple platforms and multiple devices.
Shohei Miyazaki, business development director at Soliton, said that 2FA adoption has dramatically increased. The problem is that most solutions require a re-write of the website to support it and also single-sign on. His solution is best described as a reverse proxy that handles both 2FA and SSO with minimal changes to existing websites.
Miyazaki said the ease of deployment meant he was winning customers from much bigger companies.
Another growing opportunity is to manage certificates for browsers. Mobile browser management is the new mobile device management, Miyazaki said, but this time focusing on managing and installing SSL certificates in browsers. These could be on any type of device but as long as the browser has the certificate, employees can then use that browser to access web enterprise apps.
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