Can enterprises embrace the Amazon Kindle Fire ?

The Kindle Fire has finally been released, and has made its way to the hands of hundreds of thousands of customers. While it is not known how many of those users are going to bring the device to the enterprise when holiday season is over, it is only logical to assume that there will be thousands of devices making their rounds inside the corporate firewalls across America at least for now.

Google News technology sections are filled with reviews both positive and negative around the device. Mostly positive. After all, the press has been waiting for link bait like this for a while. After the initial obligatory reviews around the device itself, attention is slowly turning towards whether and how well the Fire can adapt to the enterprise. Despite being a glorified electronic shopping cart for amazon, the Fire is still a formidable contender in the android tablet space. Will enterprises embrace it with both hands, or will it fizzle at the enterprise doorstep ? No one knows for sure.

From where we stand, we see IT admins may have little choice but to work backwards from the device and find creative ways to ensure they can support the device. At the end of the day, when the CIO gets a fire for christmas, its pretty much game over, you have to suport it.

As far as device capabilities go, the Kindle fire is a first class citizen in the Android world. it runs Gingerbread, and there is no excuse for not supporting the fire just because it has been heavily customized by Amazon. Amazon has done a great job of changing the OS on the surface to make it friendly for end users, but has not really backtracked on the underlying capabilities of the OS when it comes to security and sandboxing. So it can be made as secure as Gingerbread on any other phone the user may purchase. The fact that most MDM vendors have not taken the effort to test on the fire and publish their agents on the Amazon Market is probably less Amazon's fault and more a factor of prioritization by the MDM vendors. The vendor that makes the necessary investments to support the Fire and to get the MDM agent published on the amazon appstore for android will be met with eager enterprises wanting to support the device.

As always, NitroDesk TouchDown runs on the Kindle Fire with no reduction in functionality or security. From TouchDown's point of view, the fire is yet another tablet running android Gingerbread. The Fire does not have a built in Exchange email client, does not have a calendar application built in, but it has all the necessary underlying support for TouchDown to provide push email and a sandboxed contact/calendar/task/note database to customers who want a tablet experience on it. In fact, TouchDown is the only available exchange activesync client which can provide a full screen tablet optimized experience on the Fire. The only shortcoming on the device we have observed is the inability for the device to maintain a Wifi connection when the device is asleep, preventing push mail from working in that state. We have worked hard to ensure that the Fire is supported as a first class device with all the encryption and security support that the enterprise needs. Any MDM which touchdown integrates with, that publishes their agent on the Amazon AppStore will be immediately supported by NitroDesk.