With HP Adaptive Device Management, you can manage Windows from the cloud—even legacy apps

What is HP Adaptive Device Management?

The new service continues HP’s partnership with Microsoft, tying the two vendors closer together. The goal of Adaptive Device Management is to provide an avenue for organizations to move to the cloud for modern management while still managing legacy applications. It’s a service aimed at larger organizations with at least 2,500 employees.

HP developed Adaptive Device Management after releasing their device as a service (the other DaaS) product for modern environments but noticed that many customers couldn’t really use it just yet.

Basically, Adaptive Device Management wraps Intune and SCCM into a managed service that HP bolts additional service offerings onto. It gives companies with legacy applications a way to move to the cloud that follows Microsoft’s co-management solution, while making it possible to scale up and provide remote management. HP handles the day-to-day endpoint management tasks, allowing an organization’s admins to focus elsewhere. You send your applications to HP, which then handles app distribution.

HP calls Adaptive Device Management a hybrid modern management experience: Intune manages the modern applications, while an Azure-hosted SCCM handles the legacy apps. HP wouldn’t explain exactly how it worked, except telling me that it’s an “architecture[al] design that HP developed” that leaves the app thinking it’s running on prem. One way this could be done in general though, is when the Azure-hosted instance of SCCM has an app repository and pushes it down to the devices, they’re doing networking tricks behind the scenes, so this isn’t disrupted.

They lean into the term “bridge to modern” management during my briefing, which is interesting given that Jack noticed that during Ignite 2019 that Microsoft had moved away from that language themselves, saying, it “isn’t a bridge; it’s a destination” (even though an FAQ then walks it back and says it’s both). HP Adaptive Device Management uses Intune policy enforcement, migrating an organization’s old group policies to modern management to make them more manageable.

HP uses their TechPulse analytics and Microsoft Desktop Analytics to get a complete view of your deployment, while keeping an eye on making sure all devices remain working and compliant. For example, this can give HP insights into every device’s BIOS and helps them to ensure it remains up to date.

With Adaptive Device Management, if a PC needs to be replaced, the user could be working again in roughly half an hour, according to HP. Should a device fail, they could grab a new one from an HP Tech Café locker (if your organization has one, of course). HP uses Autopilot and their factory services to have a clean, business-ready image of Windows 10 installed on new, ready-to-use devices. All the user has to do is log into their new device with their Azure Active Directory account to get their apps pushed to them.

As for the broken device, what happens depends on the customer agreement and preference. One option is to place it into the locker, where HP will retrieve it and repair it, or the customer can choose to ship it directly to HP for repairs. 

For security, HP provides hardware-enforced threat protection and monitoring. Adaptive Device Management helps make sure devices remain in compliance and HP can remotely fix issues if a device is found not to be compliant. Through their September acquisition of Bromium, HP offers users a secure browser. Other features include HP Sure Start (checks BIOS upon startup and protects it from malware) and Sure View (built-in privacy screen), which can be used for conditional access (for example: only allow access to certain documents if Sure View is enabled). HP also offers HP Proactive as an add-on service, for an extra fee.

For Adaptive Device Management pricing, HP charges a monthly subscription fee either added onto existing PCs in your environment or bundled together with new devices as part of their HP DaaS service (remember it’s “device as a service”).

Wrap up

With Adaptive Device Management, HP offers large organizations an interesting take on Intune/SCCM co-management—especially if you already are an HP customer. It could even work alongside the recently announced Microsoft Endpoint Manager quite well. HP handles getting your legacy applications into the cloud for easier management coupled with improved scalability and other added bells and whistles.

Pretty much every company has those legacy apps you can’t just ditch, which limits moving to the cloud or modern management—which is where HP hopes to compete with this product. They take over management and distribution of your apps, making it possible for your admins to focus elsewhere.