Today, IBM Security announced that its market-leading, cloud-based enterprise mobility management (EMM) platform, MaaS360, will feature an enhanced user experience with a redesigned container (email, calendar and contacts) and corporate app catalogs for both iOS and Android. Through these updates, IT administrators can scale large device and app deployments, secure corporate data and increase user collaboration while improving mobile user productivity.

Deep Mobile Insights Translate to Increased Mobile Productivity

In an unprecedented view into app adoption in business, IBM analyzed app deployments across more than 100,000 apps and nearly 10 million app distributions managed by the MaaS360 platform. The analysis found that the most app-heavy organizations manage nearly 500 apps, with some nearing 1,000 apps in their corporate app catalog.

These apps range from productivity and convenience apps to specialized vertical processes. The analysis also found that 80 percent of the apps being distributed are developed by third parties, making it critical to manage their deployment.

“Fortune 2000 customers with large deployments of users, devices and apps are finding out the hard way that mobile success is not easily achieved with a patchwork of solutions,” said Wesley Gyure, a MaaS360 portfolio offering manager at IBM.

“Our mission is to make mobile working simple, secure and scalable for our customers. With MaaS360, IT organizations now have a control point for mobile policy orchestration, productivity enablement and security enforcement, all powered by deep insights.”

Enhanced Collaboration, Containment and Security Options

The new MaaS360 Productivity Suite and App Catalogs have been updated. As part of the process, IBM worked to incorporate enterprise productivity features and a user-friendly, native OS experience. For example:

• Users will now be able to switch seamlessly between email, calendar and documents for nimble multitasking.
• Extensive swipe gestures have been added for more natural navigation and quicker actions.
• App catalogs feature banners to promote rapid app adoption, and bundles of apps can be created for one-touch installation.
• Users can directly rate apps and provide personal reviews that empower mobile productivity and intercompany collaboration.
• Calendar now sports single-touch functionality to join conference calls and Web meetings, eliminating the need to manually enter passcodes.
• Additional improvements include a new enterprise chat capability, mail and calendar search, multiselect actions and better readability for email, calendar and documents.

The platform also features improved integrations with Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps, IBM Verse, Box and other popular business collaboration tools, providing customers with the flexibility to choose the best solution for users.

Further Enhancements and Integrations

IBM MaaS360 is the first EMM platform to deliver an app for the IBM Security App Exchange. This new app provides a dashboard that highlights out-of-compliance events and devices for smartphones and tablets. Enterprises can now correlate security events with over 400 data sources that feed into IBM QRadar, including network access control and identity and access management systems, to quickly identify and mitigate security risks.

Through its various security offerings, IBM MaaS360 provides IT teams with the tools they need to separate personal and corporate information across different users, devices and apps. These options give customers the ability to address varied security requirements and user needs by offering either layered or tiered security. Security requirements may include essential mobile device management, data containment, app security, mobile threat management and advanced controls of corporate data for specific use cases.

IBM MaaS360 customers can feel confident using an EMM platform that’s built on IBM’s world-class security and management capabilities. Today’s announcement further extends IBM’s mission to accelerate mobile productivity by enabling large-scale app deployments, providing users with the native experience they expect and increasing security through analytics. These capabilities are all delivered seamlessly through the integration of IBM products as well as comprehensive support for a broad ecosystem of over 400 technology partners.