India, Sept. 14 -- The most revealing technology decision is sometimes the one that never becomes a launch announcement.

Arjun Wadwalkar, Director of Product Management at Global Payments, once faced a version of it on a compressed timeline. A distributed fleet of point-of-sale devices needed a reliable way to install applications, manage updates and support different operating systems remotely, and the business needed an answer quickly.

Building a proprietary device-management platform was possible. It would also have required considerable engineering time, specialist expertise and long-term maintenance. Buying an existing product looked faster, but only if a vendor could satisfy the company's requirements for security, compliance, arc...