Mobile Enterprise Adoption news:
MEAN Summary:
- Comparing EMM Enterprise Mobility Management and Desktop Management
- Consumerization vs IT’s business applications
by Brian Madden 
You may remember a few months ago I wrote an article suggesting that the topics of “Desktop Virtualization” and “Consumerization” were merging. I also announced at that time that we intended to merge the contents of our ConsumerizeIT.com website into BrianMadden.com. Even though it’s taken six months, we’ve finally done that. As of today, all content that was on ConsumerizeIT.com is now available via the “Consumerization” tag on BrianMadden.com.
In looking through the list of Consumerization articles, it quickly became apparent that we really had two different focus areas on that site: Enterprise Mobility Management (MDM, MAM, BYOD, etc.) and the broader “What does consumerization mean for IT” issue. And then it hit me: We need to break those two areas out when we integrate them with the desktop management content of BrianMadden.com.
If you think about it, Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) and Desktop Management are basically the same concept applied to different devices. Desktop Management is about managing devices with traditional OSes like Windows, and EMM is about managing new-style devices with mobile-like OSes like iOS, Android, Blackberry, and Windows Phone OS. Sure, the management styles are different, but they’re both basically the same thing.
Then on top of Desktop Virt and EMM, we have this “consumerization” thing that’s the over-arching trend that affects how IT delivers apps and manages devices. While it makes for great conversation, you can’t go out and buy any products that “solve” consumerization per se. Instead you buy specific products for specific subsets of consumerization. (You buy desktop management to deal with Windows and laptops, you buy EMM to deal with phones and tablets, etc.)
I’ve always argued that IT is really about providing access to business applications and data. Consumerization flips that model around a bit, but when it comes to actually providing that access, this is where Desktop Virtualization and EMM kick in (again, depending on the device).
Long story short, even though we started this website ten years ago to focus on desktop virtualization, in today’s world you really can’t cover desktop virt without also covering EMM. And you can’t cover those two issues without also looking at how they’re both affected by Consumerization. So that’s our refined mission on BrianMadden.com. We’ll focus on Consumerization, Desktop Virtualization, and Enterprise Mobile Management. (Actually you could argue that these are the topics we’ve been focusing on for the past few years… it just took us until right now to realize that. 🙂
If you’re just getting started with the newer areas, check out everything we’ve written in the past year onconsumerization and EMM. (And if you haven’t been following the EMM topic on ConsumerizeIT.com, Jack Madden will now write about it for BrianMadden.com. In 2012 he wrote 110 blog posts on EMM alone, and his book on EMM comes out in a few months. We’re happy to have him full time now.)
