Today, we’re introducing the preview of a new offering built to help IT professionals bolster their strategic value in the cloud era. The latest addition to our IT management portfolio, AppGuru provides IT pros with the tools needed to embrace, secure and manage the rapid influx of business and employee-introduced cloud applications into the workplace – the types of apps that often gain a foothold with little or no IT involvement. While control is certainly part of this, the real story – the real value – is how a solution like AppGuru can help IT adopt new management approaches to encourage the broader, secure use of employee-introduced solutions.
In a nutshell, AppGuru brings brings together Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) features, provisioning and policy management for cloud apps, ranging from SaaS enterprise applications to cloud productivity suites to employee-introduced business and personal apps. It’s a product that we believe can help IT be better positioned to be an expert advisor to business sponsors and a partner with employees in the cloud app era. And it’s a product whose genesis ties back to the intersection of LogMeIn’s IT management and cloud app businesses.
Our own cloud apps – LogMeIn Free/Pro, join.me, and most recently Cubby — have attracted millions of users, and they, like most popular cloud apps, have become widely popular in the workplace, often outside of IT’s purview. After some internal grassroots adoption, these apps begin to bubble up to IT decision makers, who might recognize the benefit of such tools, and then look to us to help them with broader team or company-wide adoption, as well as better management.
At the same time, we’re hearing a consistent message from our large base of IT customers: They are not looking to play the role of ‘gatekeeper’ when it comes to app usage but are struggling to find a way to best manage users, subscriptions, policies, and of course, information sharing. Many of them are even seeing cloud apps – like other kinds of bring-your-own tech – not as a threat to IT-procured applications, but rather as an opportunity to save money on underutilized apps while deferring to employees’ preferences.
We see AppGuru as a product born from that unique perspective. That said, we’d rather have IT pros tell us whether or not we’ve hit the mark, and help us to help them with new updates and capabilities to meet their evolving needs.
So whether you’re an IT pro, a business user using our cloud apps, or an existing customer of our IT management offerings, take a look, and let us know what you think.
