Guest Column
N-able's Roadmap: Mobility Now, Cloud Later
If Robert Grapes could get one feature into N-able's N-central remote management platform, it would be mobile device support.
Fortunately, as director of product management and marketing at N-able, Grapes is in a unique position to make that wish come true. And in fact, managing remote devices is one of the biggest items on the 2012 roadmap from the Ottawa-based RMM-tool vendor.
To be clear – that's not accessing the N-central console via mobile devices. The company has long allowed the ability to do that on the iOS platform and has recently launched an Android client too. Rather, the focus at N-able is on being able to manage those same mobile devices.
And in the locked-down vs. open world of mobile device platforms, it may be a surprise which platform is the easiest to work with from a remote management perspective.
In fact, it's Apple's iOS, legendary for its locked-down, sandboxed and untouchable approach, that's proving the easiest to build mobile management for. The reason – while Apple is keeping people out of the lower levels of the operating system themselves, it's providing the hooks developers need to enable the functionality. Grapes said that the iOS Configuration Utility offered by Apple "really opens up the door for us do [management] functionality in a single pane of glass." So when it comes to the development of remote device management, which N-able is building in-house, iOS is in the lead.
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