But how do you define a business's size? The most common measure used is the number of employees; useful because most business will disclose this information. Turnover would be another way, but many private companies keep this information to themselves so it is of little practical use especially in the small and mid-sized business (SMB) market.
But even number of employees is problematic; do you count temporary workers, contractors, and employees of outsourcers? There is no simple answer, because it depends on what you are selling. If it is chairs, most office-based workers need one, employee or not, but home-workers do not even if they are employees. This problem of definition is particularly acute for vendors of information technology (IT); here what really counts is the total number of IT users and the proportion they form of the total work force varies widely.
But even that does not tell the whole story. Increasingly, businesses in all industries are becoming more and more reliant on vast networks of IT devices that are not assigned to users; in some cases the number of devices may exceed the number of employees by a considerable factor. Take the world's 4th largest lottery organiser, the UK's Camelot. It employs a modest 1,000 or so people making it a mid-market company in most people eyes, but it sells its products via over 26,000 outlets all of which have lottery terminal of some sort-an enterprise network by any standard.
Lotteries may sound exceptional, but they are not. Examples of vast networks of "non-PC" IT devices are all around us: customer information displays at rail-stations, bus stops and airports, in-store advertising on video monitors, huge networks of surveillance cameras, wireless LAN devices providing public internet access in coffee shops.
Some of these devices are linked together by private networks but many rely on the public internet (or cloud if you prefer) for at least part of their connectivity to the central systems that drive them. For this reason, at least in part, the communications protocol used for running and managing such network is most commonly IP (internet protocol), as have all the tools available for managing such device networks.
Management tools allow software patching, fault monitoring, security updates and so on to be carried out remotely. This ensures high availability whilst keeping costs down, engineers only needing to be despatched when there is a hardware fault. Specialist tools also enable remote power management, for example switching off monitors at night-cutting costs and earning environment points to boot.
Traditional systems management tools from the likes of BMC, CA, HP, IBM and Microsoft are focussed on broader IT management and whilst they have end point management capabilities embedded in their product, this is not a primary focus and the end point management modules are not generally sold separately.
There are a number of specialists in end point management; these include software offerings like Altiris (owned by Symantec), Bigfix, Ipswitch, and LANDesk. Another, Kaseya, provides a software platform specifically targeted at MSPs. Then there are appliance based products such as Uplogix's secure remote management.
So some might find a cloud based service a better way to go, after all the devices are in the cloud, the users are in the cloud so why not put the management tools and data in the cloud too? This is leading to an increasing interest in software as a service (SaaS) based offerings like NTRglobal's NTRadmin. Other "SaaS" like offerings are being developed based on tools from some of the vendors listed above.
One thing is for sure, any vendors wanting to take lead in the market for remote end point management needs to focus on counting devices not just people.
