The skyrocketing popularity of mobile devices is having a huge impact on enterprises, presenting many opportunities—and more than a few challenges. Here’s a case in point.

Recently, a major organization developed its own mobile app designed to help members of its sales force keep track of customer engagements. Formerly reliant solely on company-purchased BlackBerrys, the organization, like many others in recent years, began moving away from being a pure BlackBerry shop as more and more of its employees began using their own mobile devices for work.

The app the company designed was platform-agnostic and usable on all device platforms, including smart phones and tablets. Even better, all of the members of the organization were able to install the app on their personal devices as long as they got the okay from IT.

Unfortunately, there was a catch. Whenever personnel left the company, they had to agree to allow IT to take their device—sometimes for an entire day—and, for security reasons, delete not only the app, but also wipe the entire device. Personal photos, music, contacts, apps—everything on the device would all be gone.

Needless to say, this did not sit well with employees, many of whom didn’t even bother to download the app. As a result, the overall reach and efficacy of the app was severely limited, impacting the company’s ROI for its mobile investment.

The moral? If managers in the company had understood the nuances differentiating mobile application management (MAM) and mobile device management (MDM), their app may have been a bigger hit and they would have been able to capitalize on the power of mobility to achieve their corporate goals.

An Enterprise Explosion

Smart phones and tablets are now so pervasive, it’s hard to believe we once lived in a world where we couldn’t get our daily Angry Birds fix. In business, it used to be that only top executives toted these devices. That’s no longer the case.

Many employees, regardless of their position within a company, are equipped with their own personal pocket computers, whether iPads, iPhones, Androids, or other smart devices. In fact, according to a recent IDC survey, 95% of employees are using their own personal technology devices within the workplace.

At the same time, people expect an enjoyable mobile experience when obtaining and deploying mobile apps on their devices. And enterprises are certainly taking notice, as the creation and distribution of enterprise apps to enhance workflow and productivity, and strengthen customer engagement, is on the rise.

There’s an explosion of enterprise mobile apps that are being deployed both for internal team use and external engagements. Businesses building mobile apps are seeing the opportunities, but are also feeling the pain that has come along with it—needing to figure out how to deploy and operate apps securely, ensure apps run properly on a multitude of devices, issue updates as efficiently as possible, and more.

As a result of this fragmentation, IT managers may automatically think about managing the mobile devices within the organization. After all, that’s what they did with those BlackBerrys, right? In addition to enforcing device policies, however, organizations must also consider how best to manage their apps from the very beginning—at the data level.

These two disciplines, MDM and MAM, are both critical platforms in the ecosystem of enterprise mobility management. But there are key differences when looking at how each one impacts the optimization of the enterprise mobile experience.

Losing & Gaining Control

With so many devices floating around an organization, it’s now much easier (and more cost-effective) for a company to develop its own apps and place them on employees’ devices. It’s also much harder, if not impossible, to exert any level of control over those devices as the company does not own them. This is where the differences between MAM and MDM come into play.

MAM sits inside the app looking out. It centers around data, enabling the IT manager to control the app at just about every level, including authorization, analysis, security, deployment, monitoring, and more.

For example, MAM allows a manager to easily issue configuration updates to a company app at a specified time and have those updates automatically pushed to each end user, regardless of whether the user is using an iPad, Droid X2, BlackBerry Bold, or anything else. It enables managers to not only see how employees are using an app and the features that get the most use, but also see detailed, rich data to inform any adjustments that might need to be made to enhance usage and achieve maximum ROI.

Likewise, MAM also gives a manager an easy way to wipe the app data from an individual employee’s phone without having to wipe the phone’s entire memory. MAM allows managers to manage company policy within the app itself without having to rely on access to a particular tablet or phone.

MDM involves devices. It sits outside and tries to look in to see how each end-user device is configured. It also ensures software updates are aligned with those devices’ specifications. Through MDM, managers are only able to manage company policy for the device itself and telecom plan/usage. This is fine if an organization is committed to using only one type of company-sanctioned device (the old BlackBerry model), but it’s becoming increasingly more challenging as the diversity of personal devices within the workplace grows.

As the popularity of iPads, iPhones, Androids, and similar devices continues to rise—and as more users begin to choose different devices to suit their own unique needs—the need to focus on MAM is going to become increasingly more important. And taking control of apps from the data level is already proving to be the most efficient, cost-effective and, yes, employee-friendly way of managing enterprise mobile applications.

The good news? MAM is still in its infancy. It’s not too late for organizations to begin thinking less about the devices and more about the apps themselves.