BYOD Drives Odyssey Software Support for Kindle Fire

Odyssey Software, the mobile device management (MDM) provider, has updated its signature Athena MDM platform and added what the software company is calling “premium support for the Amazon Kindle Fire.”

Previously, Odyssey’s Athena platform only supported enterprise customers using Windows Phone, Android, Apple iOS, and Windows Embedded CE devices. Odyssey added support for Windows Phone 7.5 — a.k.a. Mango — in December 2011.

But now Athena supports Kindle Fire users, meaning customers working on the Amazon tablet can use Athena to get live access to devices, reset passcodes, set passcode policies, deploy applications and documents, lock and wipe data from the Kindle Fire, and report hardware, software, network and device health information.

The recent Holiday shopping season triggered Odyssey’s Kindle Fire support. When making the announcement, Odyssey Software CEO Mark Gentile noted that millions of Kindle Fire Tablets were sold in December. In theory, many of those devices are making their way into workplaces and onto corporate networks, as the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) phenomenon continues to spread.

And as BYOD becomes more pervasive, enterprise IT administrators are looking for ways to manage all of the different devices employees are bringing to work. When you take all of that into account, supporting the Kindle Fire, among other mobile devices, is really a no-brainer for Odyssey and MDM software providers in general. The bottom line? You can expect other MDM players to add support for the Kindle Fire, as well as any other consumer-favorite mobile devices.