BlackBerry says MDM Pure Plays are dying off

Besides messaging app BBM, BlackBerry has another potential crown jewel in BES 10. The Mobile Device Management (MDM) system allows corporations to control a fleet of smartphones. Because the enterprise requires more from MDMs now than ever before, BlackBerry says that the Pure Play MDMs are dying. The Canadian manufacturer says that capabilities like email syncing and remote wiping of lost devices, are no longer good enough to sell an MDM system to a corporation.

According to BlackBerry, today's MDMs need to include support for container applications (think Samsung KNOX), different handsets and operating systems, and make sure that core business processes used by mobile workers are secure. While BlackBerry admits that some pure MDM companies are trying to add on these new services, the company asks how secure you'd feel when having your company's smartphones managed by these late comers to the game.

As BlackBerry points out, it has offered MDM since 1999 and counts numerous government agencies and organizations as customers. According to Joe McGarvey, Enterprise Content Strategist at BlackBerry (and the author of the post on BlackBerry's Business Blog), the company started at the high-end of mobile device security to "meet the security needs of any enterprise. Given their heritages in the low-end MDM space, rival vendors are now bolting on security and application management capabilities."


While announcing that BES will soon support Windows Phone, CEO John Chen said that while BES continues to make money for the company, it has been losing customers since the retirement of BlackBerry 7. This is one area of the company that definitely needs to show growth and we're sure that the CEO is working on it. After all, you don't want to tell the world how some of your competitors are disappearing, only to fall off the ends of the earth yourself.

source: BlackBerry via BerryReview