Vigil fancies FancyFon for MDM glory

Software distributor hunts for 15 to 20 resellers to take on new mobile device management vendor signing

Vigil Software has signed its first mobile device management (MDM) vendor after spending nine months evaluating the market.

The software distributor has signed a three-year agreement to be the exclusive UK distributor for FancyFon, an Irish start-up whose MDM software is posetively rated by Gartner.

Vigil director Alex Teh said: "We have been looking at the MDM market for nine months and tested three different technologies in this space. FancyFon came out on top."

Teh said the distributor is hunting for 15 to 20 resellers to take the product to market.

"What is most important from a channel perspective is we have a sole-distributor agreement, which gives us the ability to manage the partner programme, deal registration and marketing to ensure partners have an airtight policy with which to work," he said.

There were only four "leaders" in Gartner's 2011 MDM magic quadrant: Sybase, MobileIron, Good Technology and AirWatch.

Like the majority of the other 19 MDM outfits assessed by Gartner, FancyFon is classed as a "niche player", although it is the best-rated European player on the technical side.

Teh said: "FancyFon has two USPs: its ability to handle almost every operating system including BlackBerry, Android, iPhone and Symbian, and the fact it is a service provider-class product.

"It is being used by Vodafone in some countries as its MDM vendor – the fact it can do role-based management and delegated management out of the box is really important."