With the movement to the cloud, Microsoft has done alot of stuff right with its Office365 offering and also done a lot with Azure, the problem that has been over the last years has been their forgotten child… Intune.
Now the concept was good, built up a fully cloud based MDM/ PC management solution as an extension to Office365, the execution how ever hasn’t been all that great at first. While Office365 and Azure got most of the focus, Intune was left behind in terms of features and focus.
But now this has changed, last year Microsoft announced their EMS (Enterprise Mobility Suite) which was a combo of Identity service with Azure AD premium, data protection with Azure RMs and MDM with Intune, Microsoft got serious with their MDM/EMM solution, and one piece that Microsoft has that none of their MDM competitors has is the identity features, which is crucial in a BYO strategy, because if people wish to use their device and using their same ID and with the strong increase of SaaS applicaitons we need a common identity provider in place (Where traditional Active Directory does not cut it, because of its limitations)
This is from the latest report from Gartner on Identity and Access Management as a service
With their offerings from within Azure AD and with many customers already using it with Office365, Microsoft has an advantage that none of their competitors have.
Gartner also released their new report on MDM/EMM as well (Where we again see Vmware, Citrix and MobileIron) note that of these 4, Microsoft is the only one that has their own mobile hardware platform and their own personal operating system which allows them go get a bit of an advantage since Microsoft is also pushing Windows 10 as a more mobile operating system and more features will be directly integrated into Intune and Azure AD.
- Windows Update for buisness
- Windows Store for buisness
- Enterprise Data Protection
and note its been a little bit over a year ago that Microsoft launched their EMS package (even thou Intune has been available for some time, it hasn’t been until recently that Microsoft started focusing on this, and with Microsoft pushing updates to Intune almost each month it shows their are serious with this offering.
And moving forward Microsoft will continue to create more and more direct integration between Office365 (where there are about 80 mill customers) which make it a winning combo and become the natural choice for many customers, since in most cases it will just be as any other addon to Office365.
(Crappy drawning I know..)
And with the integration possibilities that Microsoft has with their on-premise solution (System Center Configuration Manager) it makes sense to get access to direct manage all regular computers and mobile devices from the same solution since a device is a device and should be managed by the same staff.
Microsoft has also stated alot of new features which are coming to Azure AD, Intune and Office365, which can be seen here on their own roadmap –> http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/roadmap/Indevelopment.aspx?TabIndex=2&dropValue=AllProducts