Gartner published its latest analysis of the Unified Endpoint Management market late last week, with VMware, Microsoft, IBM, BlackBerry, and MobileIron ranked as the leaders. Microsoft continues to improve its capabilities and cadence in this space, being listed as the second-to-top leader. And it is trending in the right direction over time. As Brad Anderson, Corporate VP of Enterprise Mobility + Security at Microsoft says:

Since the last 2017 Gartner Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) MQ was published, we have added more than 10M new devices under Intune management. There are now more than 135M PCs and mobile devices being actively managed by ConfigMgr and Intune. THAT is Unified Device Management – and that usage number is growing by more than 3M every month!

Microsoft’s key offering is Enterprise Mobility + Security, which combines device management, more advanced Azure Active Directory capabilities (such as conditional access), data protection (via Azure Information Protection), the full Microsoft Cloud App Security, and more. Enterprise Mobility + Security (or EMS for short) is available as a standalone subscription from Microsoft, or in conjunction with Office 365. It is also one of the three core capabilities in the Microsoft 365 bundles – for Business and Enterprise customers. The other two are Office 365 and Windows 10. The highest Office 365 plan you can purchase is Enterprise E5, but when you look at the details, there are capabilities missing that an additional subscription to Enterprise Mobility + Security E5 covers (either directly, or for better combined value, as part of a Microsoft 365 subscription). In my head, I think of Microsoft 365 as basically an Office 365 E6 or E7 plan, but that’s my name for it, not Microsoft’s.