Mobile device management market heats up, CA Technologies stakes a claim
CA Technologies is aiming at the mobile device management (MDM) market, hoping to elbow out some of the smaller companies that have taken an early lead.
Thanks to the rise of the bring your own device culture, MDM is a white hot technology area right now as enterprises struggle to deal with the security issues that arise from the use of personal devices in the office.
It's also a very crowded market — dominated by smaller start-ups and also software developed by smartphone makers themselves, but increasingly the big enterprise players are keen to get involved, especially as mobile devices are used to access more corporate applications.
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CA said today it has licenced SAP's Afaria mobile device management software and plans to use that as the basis for its enterprise mobility roadmap.
Ram Varadarajan, general manager of new business innovation at CA rejected suggestions that the company was late to invest in MDM: "We are in the very early stages of the market," he said.
"What enterprises want is not just device management, they want management of the entire ecosystem. What we are providing is the entire fabric and that's very hard to do; point solutions fix today's problem but they don't have the breadth to fix the CIO's problems," he said at the CA World event in Las Vegas.
CA will begin by offering mobile device management and then throughout the rest of this year add mobile application, content and services management to its offering. Varadarajan said that over time, MDM will become just another part of the enterprise management model, which will play to the strengths of companies such as CA and SAP.
"Mobility will no longer be separately talked about it will be part of the enterprise infrastructure," he said.
TechRepublic's own BYOD research found that 62 percent of companies either already allow BYOD or plan to by the end of this year.
CA has also acquired the privately-held API management and security company Layer 7 Technologies, and said its technology will help with CA's mobile push by securing the APIs that mobile devices use to access a variety of mash-up services. CA said that this will become increasingly important as the internet of things brings TVs, meters and other devices online.
ZDNet attended CA World as a guest of CA Technologies.