Almost 1 year ago I posted about the rise of the purposed mobile device. 12 months later it is very gratifying to see that mobile solutions deployments are beginning to pick up traction in far more use cases that we had ever imagined. The industry as a whole has gotten more sophisticated in understanding the unique requirements that come with using tablets and smartphones. Deploying thousands of devices as a mobile POS is very different than deploying thousands of personal devices in a BYOD scenario.
One of the important things we have learned from many of our customers is that your BYOD platform will fail when if you’re using it to deploy purposed mobile solutions. All the tablet kiosks, mobile point of sale, digital signage and countless other use cases we have seen make it obvious that you can’t just use the same old tools you have used to manage personal devices for managing purposed deployments. The demands on a platform to manage personal devices are different than the demands made by purposed devices, both from a technical standpoint as well as a business process and workflow standpoint. On the personal side you have a user that takes care of the device, installs their own apps and mixes personal and enterprise data. On the purposed side you need to lock the user out of managing the device, you want to be alerted when the battery is low or there are connectivity issues and app updates need to be managed centrally.
