Jamf's Year of Subverting Unified Endpoint Management
Jamf has had a busy year improving and expanding its product. It’s convincing many organizations to avoid the siren song of unified endpoint management. Its accomplishments over the past year include:
- Jamf Pro:
- Creating a self-service portal for Macs and iOS devices
- Partnering with Microsoft to allow Intune to manage Apple devices through Jamf Pro
- Offering zero-day support for Apple’s spring and fall releases, for the seventh consecutive year
- Providing tvOS management
- Jamf Now:
- Unveiling the Jamf Now Plus plan, which allows for custom iOS app and package deployment/management
- Providing greater management of macOS
- Launching the Jamf Now Getting Started Kit in Apple retail stores
- Acquiring NoMAD and launching Jamf Connect, a new product aimed to improve identity and access management capabilities
- Acquiring ZuluDesk in order to improve Mac and iOS management in the education space
- Reaching 26,000 clients and managing 13 million devices
- Hitting a record 75,000 members of Jamf Nation, the world’s largest Apple IT administrator community
Our Take
Jamf is dominating SoftwareReviews’ Enterprise Mobility Management category despite not supporting Android devices. I dug into the report and found overwhelming support for the product, even among those that implemented it without support from Jamf or a third party.
Source: SoftwareReviews, March 6, 2019. Number of Jamf Pro respondents: 80; Number of VMware AirWatch respondents: 44; Number of Citrix Endpoint Management respondents: 46.
Jamf makes no attempt at unified endpoint management – it exclusively manages Apple products, unlike VMware and Citrix, which both provide products that allow IT to manage PCs and Macs alike. However, Jamf has been scoring higher on key metrics.
If Citrix and VMware are able to significantly improve IT administrators’ satisfaction with their products and their customer service, Jamf will be in trouble. Until then, Jamf Pro provides a very compelling reason to avoid the siren song of unified endpoint management.
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