Aerohive, JAMF Team For Big Channel Opportunity In Apple MDM

The combined offering from the two vendors offers not only full management of Apple mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPad, but also control of eBook and app distribution and policy creation and enforcement. The target customers are educational institutions but also enterprise users with varied needs, said Joel Vincent, director of product marketing at Aerohive, Sunnyvale, Calif.

"This is a complete networking and management solution for Apple devices," Vincent told CRN this week.

Vincent said Aerohive came across JAMF through both companies' association with the Apple Consultants Network (ACN), the Apple-approved group of VARs, integrators and consulting firms that specialize in the Apple ecosystem.

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Founded in 2002 and based in Minneapolis, JAMF's flagship product is the Casper Suite, which was developed exclusively to manage Mac OS X and iOS environments. JAMF's ties to Apple are deep, Vincent said, in that the the company not only does zero-day development for iOS releases but is also on Apple's business price list, meaning Apple VARs can order JAMF products from the same place they'd order Apple devices.

"They've gone 10 miles deep with Apple," Vincent said. "They started in the management area with Macs and servers and managing those systems, and when mobile devices came out they put iOS management in their portfolio -- and that was before it got trendy."

Six-year-old Aerohive, which became a buzzed-about startup in the channel thanks to its so-called cooperative control architecture-based, controller-less approach to wireless networking, has broadened its footprint in the past two years to address cloud services and BYOD challenges.

Many of the vertical markets JAMF addresses, particularly education but also retail and health care, are Aerohive specialties. Those customers have particular needs, whether it's POS systems with PCI compliance concerns in retail, or the use of electronic medical records in a health-care setting where employees have to pay close attention to HIPAA regulations, Vincent said.

"You'd be talking with a customer who'd ask, 'How do we issue iPads as a POS system in 100 stores?' for example," Vincent said. "They want to lock them down so they can be used for nothing but a certain application, and there are measures that can be taken to make sure it's enrolled and re-enrolled. They want these things together as a simple package and not have to piecemeal it together."

Going forward, JAMF mobile device management (MDM) enrollment will be a free feature in HiveOS/HiveManager 5.1, the next version of the Aerohive wireless platform, which is expected in early July.

JAMF is waiving licensing fees on the Casper Suite for educational institutions, Vincent said, noting it's a challenge for most educational institutions to enroll new devices with an MDM profile -- whether it's forcing students to install the profile or, even after that's done, preventing students from uninstalling it. According to Vincent, the Aerohive/JAMF solution not only automates the enrollment process, but automatically disables the network when a student uninstalls the profile and alerts an IT administrator if the profile has been altered.

The MDM conversation is happening everywhere, Vincent said, and in most of Aerohive's key verticals, the conversation is centered on Apple devices 80 percent of the time.

"JAMF is the first partner to do this with us, but we haven't done anything so proprietary it would preclude any other MDM vendor from working with us," he said. "But there was so much channel overlap we found with JAMF that this just became an obvious solution for both of us."

Apple MDM presents an ongoing opportunity for the channel, Vincent explained, and one that Aerohive will continue to attack. Earlier this year, Aerohive launched its Bonjour Gateway for enabling wireless Apple functions such as AirPlay and AirPrint to easily run across multi-subnet enterprise networks.

PUBLISHED ON JUNE 27, 2012