WSO2 Launches WSO2 Enterprise Mobility Manager, Industry’s Only Open Source Software for Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Mobile Application Management (MAM)

WSO2 EMM features enterprise mobile app store for Android and iOS to facilitate enterprise mobile app management; comprehensive software runs on servers and in the cloud

Palo Alto, CA – February 19, 2014 – The rising use of personal mobile devices within the enterprise provides more flexibility for employees by fostering greater collaboration, efficiency and productivity. However, bring your own device (BYOD) policies—along with corporate-owned, personally enabled (COPE) devices—are adding new layers of complexity to managing employees’ mobile phones and tablets. Moreover, they are introducing vulnerabilities to the corporate applications and data residing on these devices. Today, WSO2 introduced its answer to these challenges with the launch of WSO2 Enterprise Mobility Manager (WSO2 EMM).

WSO2 EMM is a comprehensive product for managing an enterprise’s corporate and employee-owned devices, as well as the mobile apps running on them. Today these include any devices and applications using the Android and Apple iOS operating systems. WSO2 EMM brings several advantages and innovations in addressing enterprises’ mobility management demands:

  • As the industry’s only 100% open source mobile management solution, it provides a flexible and cost-effective alternative to proprietary products.
  • An intuitive enterprise mobile app store for Android and Apple iOS applications facilitates volume purchase management and encourages employee adoption and compliance.
  • WSO2 EMM is integrated with WSO2 Identity Server for robust authentication and authorization.
  • Extensive monitoring of mobile apps, devices and users is enabled by integration with WSO2’s big data analytics framework, including WSO2 Complex Event Processor (WSO2 CEP) for real-time analysis and WSO2 Business Activity Monitor (BAM) for batch analysis.
  • Like all WSO2 software, WSO2 EMM is multi-tenant and cloud-ready, so the same software can be deployed directly on servers or in the cloud.

“In the era of the connected business, desktop computers and laptops are being replaced by smartphones and tablets as the preferred devices for communicating, collaborating and accessing corporate applications—anytime, anywhere,” said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, WSO2 founder and CEO. “The launch of our open source WSO2 Enterprise Mobility Manager is helping to fuel this revolution by bringing a new level of ease, flexibility and access to comprehensive mobile app and device management. WSO2 EMM also marks a major extension of our commitment to empowering enterprises to develop, integrate, optimize and protect the applications and APIs that drive their business.”

First Milestone in WSO2 Enterprise Mobility Roadmap

The launch of WSO2 EMM is the first milestone in WSO2’s strategy to support today’s enterprise mobility demands. Future solutions will help developers to write mobile applications, as well. WSO2 will deliver a mobile backend-as-a-service (MBaaS) and provide software developer kits (SDKs) that help developers write secure, containerized, manageable enterprise mobile apps.

WSO2 also will add mobile app development capabilities to WSO2 App Factory, which provides an open source, open standards approach to cloud-enabled enterprise DevOps for continuous cloud delivery. Additionally, WSO2 will build on the current capabilities of WSO2 API Manager for managing mobile app APIs with the integration of WSO2 API Manager and WSO2 App Factory to help developers more easily create enterprise mobile apps that are integrated with existing APIs.

In line with this comprehensive enterprise mobility strategy, the WSO2Mobile subsidiary has been absorbed into WSO2’s core business.

WSO2 EMM: Robust Enterprise Mobility Management

“IT leaders have made it through the first wave of enterprise mobility: extending email/personal information management (PIM) to corporate and personally owned devices,” observes Gartner in the report, Cool Vendors in Enterprise Mobility, 20131. Gartner goes on to write, “They now face the challenges associated with enterprise mobility's second wave: cost-effectively extending access to corporate and personal resources, collaboration and document management functionality to a wide and continually changing assortment of mobile devices and appliances.”

WSO2 Enterprise Mobility Manager is designed to specifically address the broad mobile demands enterprises face today. It features two key components: Mobile Device Management (MDM) for securing, managing and monitoring Android and Apple iOS-powered devices, and Mobile Application Management (MAM) for publishing and provisioning mobile applications. Single sign-on (SSO) functionality in WSO2 EMM means that an authorized user can sign onto one WSO2 EMM console and then bypass the sign-on process to access the others. It also provides the ability to connect to existing enterprise user stores and provide access to the existing user bases.

WSO2 EMM is built on the same modular, fully componentized OSGi-compliant code base as the award-winning WSO2 Carbon enterprise middleware platform. Like all WSO2 middleware products, it is inherently cloud-enabled and uses proven core framework components that provide a consistent set of enterprise-class management, security, logging, statistics, tracing, and clustering for high availability and scalability, among other capabilities.

Because WSO2 EMM shares a code base with all WSO2 Carbon software, it is pre-integrated with other products that bring robust functionality for protecting and monitoring mobile apps and devices. WSO2 Identity Server brings rich capabilities for authentication and authorization. Meanwhile, WSO2’s big data analytics framework enables enterprise mobile apps, devices and their usage to be fully monitored, analyzed and acted upon—in real-time via WSO2 CEP and via batch/report style with WSO2 BAM.

Significantly, WSO2 EMM offers proven scalability in a 1.0 product, since it uses the same core technologies and runtime of WSO2 Carbon already being used by enterprises around the world, including a Global 1000 company that is handling more than 1 billion API calls per day.

Mobile Device Management

The MDM server in WSO2 EMM enables organizations to secure, manage and monitor Android and Apple iOS-powered devices irrespective of the mobile operator, service provider, or the organization. Additional mobile operating systems will be supported in future releases.

Users need to accept the license agreement, which states all the actions that can be carried out on the device when enrolling with the MDM server. MDM only controls the corporate data that is present on the devices, while personal data is left untouched. Once employees register their devices with the MDM server, applicable policy rules will be enforced on their devices. At the same time, end users can delete all the data on their devices from the MDM server, provided that they have correctly entered the PIN code, which they set during provisioning.

Using the MDM Console, an administrator can create policies in the MDM server and define the MDM aspect of the policy (i.e., device management rules). EMM policies can be set at various levels, such as user, platform and role. WSO2 EMM constantly monitors all the registered devices for policy compliance, and it will automatically generate a notification and carry out follow-up actions if a device is in violation of a policy. The MDM server also gives administrators the ability to:

  • Lock devices.
  • Enable data encryption when a device is locked. This is a mobile OS level feature.
  • Set password policy, change a device password, and clear a password assigned to a device.
  • Access the device information, such as battery, memory, applications, operator, root detection and location.
  • Configure the LDAP server on devices directly.
  • Delete enterprise data on devices.
  • Directly set device Wifi settings.
  • Configure Access Point Network (APN) settings.
  • Set up device email configurations.
  • Enable or disable the camera on a device.
  • Send messages from the MDM server to devices.
  • Configure any CalDav supported calendar on devices.
  • Mute devices.


Mobile Application Management Featuring Enterprise Mobile App Store

MAM enables organizations to control corporate applications on devices that are enrolled with the MDM server. It consists of three key consoles: Publisher, Store, and MDM Console.

Publisher

The Publisher allows users to manage enterprise applications throughout their life cycle, supporting such states such as, published, unpublished, approved, rejected, deprecated and retired. With publisher, users can upload a new mobile application and submit it for review, view an application’s details, publish an approved or unpublished application, un-publish or deprecate a published application, and retire an unpublished or deprecated application. Additionally, reviewers can accept or reject a mobile application that has been submitted for review.

Enterprise Mobile App Store

The Store builds on the functionality of WSO2 Enterprise Store, which launched in October 2013. It acts as a marketplace containing all corporate Android and iOS mobile applications, which users can search, view, rate and install on-demand. As a key part of mobile app management, the Store facilitates volume purchase management and encourages employees to comply with corporate policies for downloading and using mobile app versions approved and supported by the enterprise.

Users can log into the store and bookmark the applications of their choice, which in turn will be filtered via the My Apps page. Through the integration of the MAM and MDM servers, employees can install applications on their preferred devices. Advanced search options in the Store are based on mobile application attributes, tags, and/or categories. The Store social platform lets end users add and remove application ratings.

MAM Console

The MAM Console lets administrators manage users, administer MAM policies, and install or uninstall mobile applications either individually or in bulk. Administrators can manage users together with their assigned roles and policies. Tracking provides a comprehensive view of all the applications on the MAM server, while offering administrators the ability to filter the application list based on criteria such as users, roles, installed and uninstalled. Administrators also can define the MAM aspect of a policy (e.g., blacklisted applications and applications to be installed upon policy enforcement) via the MAM Console. Compliance monitoring provides the ability to monitor the installation of any blacklisted applications.

Availability and Support

WSO2 Enterprise Mobility Manager is available today as a software download that can run directly on servers or on top of WSO2’s platform as a service (PaaS) software; as a WSO2 Cloud Virtual Machine running on the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM), and VMware ESX; and as a public cloud service hosted by WSO2. As a fully open source solution released under the Apache License 2.0, it does not carry any licensing fees.

WSO2 EMM is backed by a world-class technical team in which the experts that helped create the software provide support, leading to direct and immediate access to the people with in-depth knowledge of the middleware. WSO2 service and support options include evaluation support, a special QuickStartSM consulting program, development support, and production support.

About WSO2

WSO2 delivers on the promise of the connected business with the only completely integrated enterprise platform that enables businesses to build, integrate and manage their APIs, applications, and Web services on-premises, in the cloud, and on mobile devices. Leading enterprise customers worldwide rely on WSO2’s award-winning, 100% open source platform and its robust governance and DevOps functionality for their mission-critical applications. Today, these businesses represent nearly every sector: health, financial, retail, logistics, manufacturing, travel, technology, telecom and more. To learn more, visit https://wso2.com or check out the WSO2 community on the WSO2 Blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

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1Gartner, “Cool Vendors in Enterprise Mobility, 2013,” by Leif-Olof Wallin, Nick Jones and Monica Basso, May 1, 2013.