Sheep Versus Goats
My high school German teacher had a saying: “Midterm exams separate the sheep from the goats.” From a sheep-herder’s perspective, sheep are superior. I grew up in cattle country with little regard for the neighboring county’s sheep-herder population, but I still held onto the idea. Someday, I would understand its meaning. When I accepted a position to evaluate enterprise mobility management (EMM) products, I was reminded of Herr Samson’s words, and I wondered:
“How does one separate the EMM sheep from the goats?”
With the myriad of EMM solutions on the market today, it’s difficult to know how to recognize the leader in the flock. For the seventh consecutive year, the Gartner Magic Quadrant for EMM gave a nod to VMware Workspace ONE, the integrated platform powered by AirWatch unified endpoint management (UEM) technology. That’s all well and good, but how do I know the solution has everything my organization needs?
I asked the smartest technical people I could find in Canada, California, Georgia and Texas.
Together, we came up with a list of the top six EMM buying criteria for enabling a totally mobile workforce, with our own workforce being a great testing ground:
- Does the solution support all our use cases?
- Can it scale with our organization?
- Do I need a PhD to use it?
- Will it support our existing application vendors and future security providers?
- Does it include Windows 10 management capabilities?
- Will it help us troubleshoot issues with our devices?
See It for Yourself
We liked the idea so much, one of the engineers, Stan Hunter, created a demo video showcase Workspace ONE’s unique capabilities in addressing these criteria and why we like to use it so much ourselves.
Summary of Our Findings: 6 Selection Criteria for Enabling a Totally Mobile Workforce
1. Does the solution support our use cases?
Yep. Workspace ONE the most complete endpoint management solution on the market. No matter the use case, the vertical industry or the region of the world, Workspace ONE has the capabilities to meet your specific needs. Stan’s demo video shows a quick example of Workspace ONE accessing any app from any device by launching a native app from an iPad without requiring any added configuration.
Over the last 11 years, Workspace ONE grew to meet the needs of thousands of customers in all verticals and regions of the world. Customers often say, “you can grow into AirWatch (and Workspace ONE), but you can’t grow out of it.”
2. Can it scale with our organization?
Yep. Scaling means more than just adding compute power. It also means including the management chops to enable a large enterprise deployment. Workspace ONE has several layers of “multi-tenancy” for ease in separating disparate groups.
At its core, Workspace ONE offers a multi-tenant architecture by using organization groups. These groups can separate customers within a single instance or can separate business units or geographical regions within a single customer’s tenant. In addition to organization groups, Workspace ONE has smart groups.
Smart groups live inside an organization group and provide an additional layer of separation between devices and users. This allows administrators to easily apply profiles and applications to specific groups of users or devices—at scale and with ease.
3. Do I need a PhD to use it?
Nope. Workspace ONE’s administration console is an easy-to-use tool that provides admins with a best-in-class console to easily access its superior features and functions. The admin console also supports role-based administration, which provides the ability to restrict access for certain administrators or groups. Seeing is believing.
In his demo, Stan shows the powerful and easy-to-use Workspace ONE admin console. Industry curated templates make it easy for admins to rollout out industry-standard policies and apps to their users with a simple mouse click, among other time-saving capabilities.
4. Will it support our existing application vendors and future security providers?
Yep. Workspace ONE provides application security by integrating with application vendors and identity solutions to ensure users are properly authenticated in a quick and easy manner. Workspace ONE also provides conditional access to applications based on device posture.
Workspace ONE provides second-to-none integrations with third-party certificate authorities using both SCEP and direct API integrations. These integrations allow customers to distribute certificates to all device types and can be used in many authentication scenarios, such as Wi-Fi, VPN and email. Existing and future security vendor support is enabled with our open ecosystem and easy API access.
5. Does it include Windows 10 management capabilities?
Yep. VMware partnered with Microsoft to provide the most complete Windows 10 endpoint management solution on the market. Workspace ONE manages not only typical mobile device management (MDM) features, but also application deployment and Windows updates. It combines the management features of MDM with those of PC Lifecycle Management (PCLM) solutions to provide customers with a complete Windows 10 management solution.
6. Will it help us troubleshoot issues with our devices?
Yep. Workspace ONE provides administrators the ability to quickly and easily troubleshoot an individual device or groups of devices. Admins can add and remove device profiles and applications directly from a device without requiring the user to un-enroll and re-enroll the device. In addition, the console provides individual device events and targeted logging for enhanced troubleshooting.
Admins can also create custom reports about device status, application installation status, all from a single console.
There Is More
VMware partners with best-of-breed solutions to provide a complete security solution for mobile devices. Workspace ONE supports the VMware Mobile Security Alliance (MSA), the AppConfig Community and has a complete set of APIs.
Custom configuration of applications on devices has typically required a custom SDK or application wrapping—a process that requires application developers to create multiple versions of their application to support different EMM vendors. VMware created AppConfig to be a standard interface that takes advantage of features that are native to iOS and Android, making it easier for developers to create transportable apps.
Guess Who?
Stay tuned later this month for a detailed comparison report that shows which vendors we used for comparison in this exercise. Feel free to “guess who” in the comment section below, and sign up for our EUC Blog newsletter to get the alert when it is live.
Sheep It Is
After this evaluation, I could see the wisdom in Herr Samson’s philosophy. Like midterm exams, there are winners and losers.
Workspace ONE aced this group’s midterm test and easily made it into the sheep category above the rest. The team of experts who worked on this evaluation include: Stan Hunter, Leon Letto, Roger Deane, Josue Negron, Prab Kalra and Camilo Lotero.
Disclaimer
No sheep or goats were injured in the writing of this article and no biases are held by the author. Both species offer advantages. In doing research for this article, I learned Herr Samson’s reference comes from the Bible and feel compelled to add that this article has no religious affiliation.
