How to Master Mixed OS Device Fleets at Scale

Devices have transformed the retail and hospitality businesses forever — and they’re here to stay. But the reality of managing those devices has grown complicated. How do you implement a consistent device management strategy when you’ve got iPads in the front of house, Android for kiosks and mobile POS, Windows for back of house, and headless Linux running on edge devices? And it seems there are always more vendors and tools being added to the device ecosystem, but no unified layer through which all of the various hardware can be managed in a consistent, scalable way. How can you get better visibility across a mixed fleet environment? Is it even possible?

The Cost of Fragmented Fleet Management

Before getting into solutions, it’s important to understand why mixed OS device fleets present challenges — and why most companies run with them anyway. Here are some of the issues you may face when managing a mixed OS device fleet, and the business consequences that can result.

• Toolchain expense Multiple MDM (mobile device management) software providers may be needed for each OS, increasing costs and operational overhead.
• Slower innovation Coordinating launches of new features and content across multiple OSes frequently leads to delays, exacerbated by different update procedures and timelines for different devices and operating systems.
• Not as secure Inconsistent application of device settings and security policy leads to increased complexity and risk.
• Poor visibility Devices end up grouped more by their OS and management tooling than by business organization. Difficult to assess total fleet health or individual store status.
• Inconsistent support Some devices may need on-site technicians, while others may allow remote troubleshooting.
• Less agile When software rollouts take weeks to complete across all devices and platforms, rapid release cycles are effectively impossible to maintain.

With all of the above drawbacks, it’s logical to ask why businesses put up with mixed OS management at all. If you can go “all in” on a single operating system or vendor, you theoretically avoid many of these pitfalls. The key word there is theoretically. Choosing a single vendor definitely doesn’t guarantee you won’t have those problems, and often comes with its own set of lock-in related headaches (reduced form factor choice, poor suitability of solutions to niche use cases, misalignment of vendor roadmap to internal priorities, captive pricing, etc).

What’s the Business Advantage of Mixed OS Edge Device Fleets?

So, does running a mixed OS fleet make sense despite all the challenges it can introduce? Quite often, yes! You can think of developing a mixed OS device strategy like diversifying your business supply chain. While you do introduce more complexity and individual points of potential failure, you also reap the benefits of being able to choose the best vendor for each fulfillment need — be it on price, quality, flexibility, or a combination of factors. 

Here are some of the major advantages to running a mixed OS device fleet (when done so properly — as opposed to a fragmented implementation).

• Cost management. By being able to select across multiple vendors and solicit quotes, you get greater control over cost (be that hardware or software) across your fleet’s entire lifecycle.
• Fitness to purpose. Instead of being stuck with a set menu of options from a monolithic or “all-in-one” vendor, you can choose the right device for the right job, regardless of operating system.
• Customer experience. You can innovate on the device form factors and software platforms your customers engage with — and that you’ve selected as the best fit for your specific business needs.
• Time to market. Deploy new hardware sooner. Whether driven by changes in customer preferences, competitive landscape, or device innovation, you can go out in the market — or build your own solution — instead of waiting on your single-source vendor to launch one.

Of course, reaping the above advantages requires a thoughtful and considered strategy for a multi-OS fleet, lest you encounter the challenges we discussed at the beginning of this article.

How Do You Build a Successful Mixed OS Device Fleet?

Now that you have a sense of why you’d want to build a mixed OS device fleet, along with the difficulties such fleets introduce, let’s look at some of the tactics you’ll need to successfully execute to scale a multi-OS device strategy.

1. Get true visibility with a unified dashboard

You can’t manage what you can’t see. When you’re dealing with a combination of Android, iOS, Windows, or Linux devices, it’s absolutely critical to make a realistic assessment of the visibility you’ll be able to achieve. Many MDM solutions are woefully inadequate when it comes to making devices across multiple operating systems visible, despite claims from marketing materials that would make you think otherwise. And even when they do offer cross-platform visibility, most only provide a very basic level of information — device name, associated groups, and last known check-in, for example.

A modern MDM solution will let you see your entire fleet in a single, unified dashboard, and allow you to dive as deep as individual device status or assess fleet health and compliance by region, form factor, or OS version. 

2. Go “hands off” on deployment with automated provisioning and rollouts

The complexity of managing multiple device types and operating systems is high, and requires substantial work to sustain through refinement of processes and operations. The challenge almost every business runs into soon is scalability: Too many manual steps to get devices deployed in the field, too few people to run those deployments, and too much time spent troubleshooting when those processes break down. Most MDMs will leave you in a lurch when it comes to automation, because they’ve been built to enable legacy processes and legacy IT-ops culture that are heavy on human intervention.

A modern MDM solution lets you build finely-tuned blueprints for your provisioning and software update motions, so that these processes become largely “hands off.” Instead of running down a list of devices to force updates or working with floor staff over the phone to get a new kiosk up and running, IT and ops teams focus on ensuring their automations are delivering the latest software, optimizing device configurations, and reducing the number of steps to deploy new hardware in the field.

3. Design for resilience with self-healing and remote device recovery

As your device count grows, your support load grows proportionally. The more device types and operating systems you have in the field, the more documentation, processes, and known issues there are for your teams to manage — making a mixed OS fleet a potential “double whammy” of support scaling challenges. Traditional MDM solutions rarely do anything to enable better support outcomes, maybe you can send a remote reboot command, manually reapply security compliance policy, or view the screen remotely — if you’re lucky.

A modern MDM solution should leverage the extensibility of each operating system to make support as seamless as possible. Automatic self-healing when devices drift from known good content, configuration, and security settings mean that fewer devices fall out of compliance in the first place. Remote control and remote debugging mean that when real issues do arise, support teams can instantly gain deep access to address acute operational disruptions (like a kiosk that fails to complete a transaction) and then move on to root cause analysis — before a localized problem potentially becomes widespread.

4. Enable continuous lifecycle planning and assessment

The days of the monolithic “rip and replace” are over. Modern device fleets are too large and heterogeneous for a wholesale, once-every-5-to-10-years overhaul. Useful lifetimes of devices are highly variable — some may have a strictly defined lifetime, like a ruggedized handheld for first responders. Others may stay in service as long as they’re still fit for their intended function, like a countertop POS or a kitchen display system. Replacement is also becoming a graduated motion, with refreshed hardware often being tested in limited deployments before a wider rollout is greenlit.

Traditional MDM tends to work best with the “set it and forget it” model of hardware deployment — as the first three steps in this section should have made clear. A modern MDM gives you the visibility, automation, and extensibility necessary to have the confidence that your devices are healthy, better assess when a device is failing, and even to enable new innovations on legacy devices and platforms to keep them in the field longer. (For example, flipping old Windows systems to AOSP.)

The Final Frontier: OS-Agnostic Fleet Orchestration

When you’re able to combine the efficiencies of unified visibility, automated deployment, self-healing, remote support, and continuous lifecycle planning, you can unlock the holy grail of mixed OS fleet management: true orchestration. When devices across all of your platforms deploy the latest content simultaneously — with fleetwide rollouts completed in hours, not weeks or months — the effort to organize and tightly integrate your device and device management strategies acts as a multiplier on your organizational confidence and innovation potential.

Imagine not just being able to deploy new software, but to test and stage rollouts of updates across each of your supported platforms and form factors in a repeatable, automated motion. Consider the possibilities that hands-off device provisioning creates for opening new locations or dynamic reallocation of resources where they’re most impactful. And think about how you can make your business more agile by introducing updated hardware and form factors on a greatly reduced timeline, but also by maintaining the innovation cycle on your existing devices longer.

With a modern MDM, the path to a sustainable, scalable mixed OS fleet strategy is there. It just takes the vision to seize that opportunity.