Remember “MDM”? Of course you do. Even though we now call it “EMM” (Enterprise Mobility Management), you’ve been using it for ten, maybe twenty years, or more. It’s the system no one outside of IT thinks much about until something in your mobile deployment goes wrong. Workers don’t interact with it, but it ensures their productive. Still, you know it can invisibly save your peak season by keeping your deployment ready for business, and quickly resolving any issues that may arise in the field.

Back in the early days, MDM for retail and supply chain organizations was Avalanche. Twenty years ago, if you purchased rugged mobile computers that came with preloaded MDM, it was likely Avalanche (my introduction to it was the Avalanche client for PalmOS, ca. 2000). Jump ahead to 2012 and as Android began to enter the supply chain market every MDM vendor wanted to make a play. In 2014 there were approximately 150 vendors in the space.  It quickly became clear that when it comes to mission critical deployments across supply chain operations, most MDM products weren’t up to the task.

Today, the number of vendors has really settled out. The integration of EMM with UEM (Unified Endpoint Management) has positioned Ivanti well across IT departments, and you can see that in the latest Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Endpoint Management Tools. On the operational side of the business, Ivanti Avalanche continues to be strong (side note: Ivanti is the only major vendor with supply chain roots to be included in the above publication).

As the EMM field has consolidated, you may feel stuck running an EMM product that’s no longer meeting your needs. Or it’s from a vendor who doesn’t understand the demands of your retail and supply chain operations. However, switching vendors has been difficult. The scope and effort to deploy a new EMM has been a daunting task. So, you’ve stayed (too long) with an EMM that isn’t working for your needs. You don’t need to wait any longer!

Ivanti has been adding some serious enhancements to our Rapid Platform. Initially developed to make the migration of legacy telnet and web application easy to move to Android, the platform now offers more: Rapid Management streamlines the installation and configuration of Avalanche deployments. Whether you’re looking to upgrade your Avalanche implementation to the latest version, or switching from another EMM vendor, we make the deployment process easy. Let me quantify that by “easy”, I’m talking about a new install, with certificates deployed, in under 30 minutes. 

The Rapid Platform automates the installation (no more sitting in front of the console to click “OK” in a dialogue box, for example). It’s simple, and built on the best practices defined by Ivanti’s Solution Engineers collected over years of implementations. So, skip that next meeting of questionable relevance, and use that block in your schedule to deploy Avalanche for yourself with our Rapid Management tool.