Configuration Manager or Microsoft Intune? How About Both?

System Center Configuration Manager is the industry standard for PC management, managing 2 out of every 3 PCs for every Enterprise in the world. Amazingly, even with this amount of acceptance, the product still increases its coverage by a full point of share every quarter.

Brad believes that rich, sophisticated PC management like System Center Configuration Manager will remain an on-premises task in the Enterprise for the near future.

Enterprise mobility, on the other hand, should be a Cloud service. Brad carefully made the decision to not just "host" Configuration Manager in the Cloud, but build a separate service that is fully Cloud capable. Intune is that service. When he looks at other vendors offerings, he considers them simply products that are just "hosted" in the Cloud, not true Cloud services.

A true, Cloud capable service is the only way to deliver a true MDM experience. In the beginning, Microsoft only needed to track Windows, so updating Configuration Manager every couple years was fine. Now, in addition, Microsoft has to track iOS, and multiple flavors of Android that change and update constantly. A Cloud-based offering (Intune) is the only way to provide the required agility to compensate quickly to continue supporting the different platforms. Microsoft can make changes to Intune that are available immediately.

Since Configuration Manager and Intune can be connected, this allows the lumbering on-premises solution to take full advantage of the quickly updating and improving feature sets of Intune.

Right now, there are 12-13,000 unique organizations using Intune as a standalone solution, and many more are using a combination of Configuration Manager and Intune. Customers have a clear choice to use one or both.