Management at Mobile World Congress, 2013

Mobile World Congress can be described in one word – massive. It is by far the largest mobile trade show in the world. The venue was changed to the Fira which gave it a more intimate feel. The show floors were closer together and it seems people have more access to the vendors than last year.

The business needs still remain. The growing number of devices requires scalable management software to monitor and control them. One contrast from last year appeared to be fewer vendors in the performance management and Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) space.

Another observation was there were less mobile app developer firms, but interesting to see Firefox and Ubuntu getting into the mobile OS space.

The Mobile Device Management (MDM) and how to deal with BYOD has picked up. ManageEngine Desktop Central introduced MDM last year at the show and has continued the R&D and marketing efforts.  It supports iOS and Android tablet and smartphones.  Just handling the inventory/asset management and configuring policy settings within the enterprise is the first step. Then baseline security policies and being able to distribute and manage both in-house and commercial apps are next. Lastly, performing audits and reporting on what is in the enterprise is part of rollout. The typical customer is the enterprise, but it's interesting to see specialty device vendors looking to OEM Mobile Device Management to offer an all around solution.

As in last year’s blog, the M2M was starting to gain momentum. This year it's really taking off.  There are many new vendors offering Smart Home/City and Power Grid equipment. Several of the big players were touting M2M management. When pressed to see a demo, one admitted that it is in the very early development stage  When they heard of the WebNMS M2M framework and how it could be customized and extended with flexible GUI look and feel and open APIs, the tuned changed and there was some genuine interest. Build vs. buy decision points. And building is an expensive proposition.

Cloud infrastructure and Cloud Management is still center on people's foreheads. There was talk about Cloud management applications for small and medium sized customers. Think of it as a Cloud NOC. 

I feel the Element and Network Management Systems will be an on-premise type of application for the near future. Scale and dependences around the OS, hardware and database and especially around security are the driving reasons. However, pushing customer fault and performance data to the Cloud is in demand and doable today.