VMware’s purchase of AirWatch shows just how important the mobile device management market is for not only end users, but big technology companies too. The move, which at $1.5 billion (€1.1 billion) is the largest acquisition in company history, also sets VMware on a path to further diversity from its core virtualisation and cloud computing markets and almost instantly become a major player in the mobile market.
AirWatch is one of the leading providers of mobile device management (MDM), or sometimes called enterprise mobile management (EMM) software. Offered mostly as a hosted package, AirWatch lets IT departments get a handle on mobile devices from wiping them clean to monitoring what is done on them, which apps are installed, when they’re updated, which content is available and with what restrictions, among other features across the Android, iOS and Blackberry devices.
AirWatch being bought by VMware is a turning point in the mobile management market, says Hyoun Park, a researcher at DataHive Consulting. “The future of mobility is moving toward virtualisation where the hardware becomes less important and managing mobile devices through software becomes more important,” he says.
With MDM technology it does not matter what devices employees of a company have, whether they are brought by employees, or company owned. If a business needs control over mobile devices similar to how it controls desktops, the technology is there to do it now. With a big-name IT vendor like VMware making such a significant splash in the market, it will bring MDM even more mainstream. “This marks the end of mobile device management as a standalone, niche category and the beginning of it as a core IT function,” Park says. “Mobility has to be a part of general IT strategy today.”
The purchase is also the latest in a string of mergers and acquisitions in the MDM market during the past 18 months, but it is the biggest in this still young industry. Citrix bought Zenprise in late 2012 and IBM scooped up FiberLink in November. Analysts expect more M&A activity to come: MobileIron and Good Technology are two other prime acquisition targets for vendors like HP and Oracle, which may look to round out their mobile strategies, says independent analyst Jack Gold.
AirWatch is in a solid position, having raised $200 million (€146 million) in a series A venture financing round in early 2013. It grew in the last year from 900 to 1,600 employees and boasts 10,000 paying customers, according to VMware. It did not have to sell, says Aragon Research’s Jim Lundy. In that sense, the move is a great one for VMware to scoop up one of the leaders of this industry. VMware will likely integrate its existing Horizon virtual desktop technology with the AirWatch platform, Gold says.
The acquisition is a significant one for VMware, and not just because of its record size for the company, but also because of the direction it points the company in moving forward. VMware has been through somewhat of a turbulent period during the past year and a half, but today’s move has made it clear that it plans to play in the end user computing (EUC) and mobile industries in a significant way. VMware went through a management shake-up which brought in a new CEO and CTO. Pat Gelsinger, the former EMC COO and Intel CTO, now heads up VMware and said that the company would have a three-pronged strategy: 1) Virtualisation, of all IT stacks, from compute, network and storage; 2) A range of private, public and hybrid cloud offerings; 3) end user computing, including mobile device management.
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