Cisco offers Meraki Systems Manager (SM), an enterprise mobility management platform supporting the monitoring, provisioning and securing of mobile devices across an enterprise network.
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Ivanti Endpoint Manager
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Ivanti Unified Endpoint Manager (formerly LANDesk Management Suite) supports enterprises with mobile security and device management (UEM), featuring remote control and problem resolution, monitoring and alerting, inventory discovery, license management, and more.
Ivanti Endpoint is also a good product, but due to the control plane is more in to on-prem at evaluation time, we were limited with resource constrains and difficult to implement in scalable manner. Also required granular deployment configurations. In Cisco Meraki SM, those two …
Better in most all categories. On-prem was not an issue for my organization. MS SCCM was lacking features. Airwatch required increasing tiers of service in order to match [Ivanti Unified Endpoint Manager (formerly LANDESK Management Suite)] features, and lacked the robust …
It is very helpful if you need to restrict the apps a student or employee can have on their device. I had teachers using Netflix on the iPads before I brought them under management. Restricting them will make you unpopular with some of your employees, however, I advise them the device is being provided for business use and, therefore we have the right and responsibility to manage it.
There is no direct replacement for the on-prem Ivanti [Unified Endpoint Manager (formerly LANDESK Management Suite)] solution. Ivanti has a companion product called Neurons, but that is in additional cost, and requires configuration with your on-prem [Unified Endpoint Manager] instance to perform basic functions. If cloud-based is a requirement for your organization, this is likely a dealbreaker. You can implement [Unified Endpoint Manager] in a cloud instance such as AWS, but the support for this appears limited. If on-prem is not an issue for you, this is a great tool for device management. It has robust features, impressive inventory, massive customization options, and excellent vendor support. If Patch Management is a problem in your company right now, this is the first product I would evaluate.
Patch(Security) is done really well. You can use roll out projects or built-in automation as well as the use of groups and scopes to design pilot and other use cases.
It takes a solid inventory of what you have of your endpoints and can do an agentless scan as well if you need to collect data that way as well.
Provisioning is rather simple and even allows you to use other products' software for the image or the built-in if you wish to do so.
Software distribution works well and has a lot flexibility built into the module.
Limited ability for "command line" functions. For example, we had a laptop that was stolen and showed to be online, but we could not wipe it. We were able to access a command prompt, but it would not accept DISKPART or FORMAT commands to try and make the PC unusable.
The GPS location is not terribly accurate and frequently it "guesses" location based off of an IP address rather than actually activating the GPS on the device. This makes tracking lost/stolen devices very difficult.
Difficulty getting devices to correctly show their status in the dashboard. For example, I can have a PC that is online and connected to the Internet, but shows to be offline in the dashboard. Only after refreshing many times would it indicate that the PC was actually online, thus allowing me to administer it.
Setup - Boy it is a pain to configure everything correctly. Be aware that you'll probably be giving an AD service account some God rights to get everything working....and security just loves that....
Cost - Boy you have to pay for everything. I suppose it lets you buy into just what you want but having repeated items go through procurement is a pain if your procurement branch is a pain.
We are happy with the product but the support and development process is far superior to any other company we have worked with. Having a good support structure is very important in today's marketplace of products that do so many things and have so many robust options and capabilities. We are very satisfied with our contract, pricing, support and product execution.
It has is easy to use overall and is very powerful. The learning curve for the system is very small and I have found it easy to train members of our team to use it. It can fit any size organization and the support is excellent. The ROI is well worth it. If you have a multiplatform ecosystem, this tool is near perfect.
Items are logically laid out and most are easy to find. The more advanced stuff can be trickier, but it is still not hard to find. There are a lot of options though, so remembering where some settings are, especially if you do not alter them often, can take a minute, but you will get to them fairly qiickly.
We have found that Cisco Meraki has always had very good customer support. In the rare case, when we have needed assistance they have always been quick to respond and solve the issue.
TRM\TAM support has been generally very good. Getting reported bug fixes, design changes, UX problems resolved has been a pain. It is often difficult to get problems escalated beyond the TRM\TAM level. Support is fantastic when you can get it, getting it can often require more work than it should, and that is probably our biggest issue.
The only product I have used that is similar is Apple Configurator. While a powerful solution, it requires physical access to the devices which is not always possible, especially on a large site. Meraki is able to achieve many of the same functions as the Apple configurator but without ever needing to physically access the device, other than initial setup and registration.
It's been many years since I did a full evaluation of other products but at the time we purchased it, the main competitors were Microsoft's SMS and Alteris. SMS just looked horribly ugly and complicated (which fit in very well with Microsoft's other server tools) and Alteris looked okay but had a piecemeal approach where even a basic deployment meant purchasing a half dozen or more components. LANDesk had one bundle for all the tools we were looking for and had a great interface for presenting the data.
It’s scalable up to a point and will scale well from small to a medium business, however, as a business grows and policies get more mature or detailed, you might have to later upgrade to a more appropriate enterprise solution such as MaaS360 or AirWatch. This solution however, will last quite a long tome for a growing business.
Our immediate take away has been a savings of thousands a year in MDM fees. We were paying around $3.00 a device with our previous MDM and our average with Meraki is about $1.88 per device. That while providing far more functionality than our previous provider.
