FrontRange Joins Rush to Fold MDM into ITSM

In the early days of mobile computing, IT rushed to cope with all the associated mania by embracing mobile device management (MDM) tools. But while the rise of mobile computing clearly caught many providers of IT service management (ITSM) software flat footed, many of them are rapidly catching up.

FrontRange Solutions has become the latest provider of ITSM software to add a suite of MDM tools to its core offering. In fact, Holger Weeres, product director for client management at FrontRange Solutions, goes so far as to suggest that there is no such thing as a separate MDM category. Instead, Weeres says IT organizations should think of mobile as a natural extension of an IT landscape that over the years has become fairly complex.

Weeres says that means that instead of swiveling between separate management consoles for each class of device, the right approach is to deploy a comprehensive ITSM framework that requires administrators to master only one core console to manage every class of devices in the enterprise.

Naturally, there’s a lot of debate as to whether traditional providers of ITSM tools can keep pace with the mobile computing revolution in the enterprise. But from a cost perspective, most IT organizations can’t afford to deploy multiple ITSM applications for different usage scenarios.

The next wave of mobile computing in the enterprise is going to be driven by embedding mobile computing applications within business processes, and once that starts to occur with greater frequency, the stakes associated with mobile computing will rise considerably.