A year ago I ran into many MSPs scratching their heads about the best way to offer mobile device management to customers who were facing a flood of users bringing their iPads, iPhones and the occasional Android device onto the corporate network.

Jessica Davis

June 6, 2012

2 Min Read
Gartner Magic Quadrant on Mobile Device Management Solutions

gartner magic quadrant

A year ago I ran into many MSPs scratching their heads about the best way to offer mobile device management to customers who were facing a flood of users bringing their iPads, iPhones and the occasional Android device onto the corporate network. But today there’s no shortage of vendors who want to sell you on their solution to configure, manage and secure this fleet of disparate devices. There are vendors that offer discrete solutions, remote monitoring and management vendors that have added MDM to the list of features their platforms offer, and even device vendors themselves such as Apple and RIM that have a solution to configure and manage these devices. Now it seems there are too many choices.

Enter Gartner Magic Quadrant.  Vendors scramble to be included in this. CIOs look to it for help in making technology choices. And although sometimes Gartner’s picks have left us baffled as to why one vendor ranked here while another ranked there, they are yet another tool for helping technology buyers and influencers make decisions.

So here’s a look at who ranked where on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for mobile device management.

Everyone wants to be in the upper right quadrant – the Leaders spot. Gartner placed the following companies there: Zenprise, MobileIron, Airwatch, Fiberlink and Good Technologies. In the Challengers box were SAP and Symantec. Visionaries were BoxTone and IBM. And most of the rest were in the niche players box.

Conspicuously absent from the list altogether were all the familiar remote monitoring and management vendors we know and love: Level Platforms, N-Able, Kaseya, LabTech, Continuum and plenty of others.  (Some have raised the point that MDM as a discrete solution for MSPs is dead.) Which begs the question: is the Gartner Magic Quadrant really all that useful to MSPs who are making decisions about platforms to deploy? What do you think?

Read more about:

AgentsMSPsVARs/SIs

About the Author(s)

Jessica Davis

Jessica Davis is the former Content Director for MSPmentor. She spent her career covering the intersection of business and technology.  She's also served as Editor in Chief at Channel Insider and held senior editorial roles at InfoWorld and Electronic News.

Free Newsletters for the Channel
Register for Your Free Newsletter Now

You May Also Like