AirWatch CEO John Marshall did not look like a man who had just spent four days at a trade show when he met with RCR Wireless News at the close of the recent Mobile World Congress 2014 event. Marshall is clearly energized by his new role at VMWare, which just bought AirWatch for $1.54 billion. The deal closed on day one of MWC.
“Now it’s time to get to work,” said Marshall “We built a whole set of platform tools over the last year, and now we’re going to extend those to the desktop, virtualization, back into the network and the server level.” AirWatch makes mobile device management software, enabling corporate IT managers to manage applications and security on a variety of mobile devices.
VMWare makes cloud-based virtualization software, and Marshall is eager to address the software giant’s customer base. “VMWware has over 500,000 customers. We’re going to go on the attack on those customers. AirWatch has 10,000. That means we have a lot of room to grow into their customer base,” said Marshall. “The other part is that they have 75,000 channel partners. We have three to 400 channel partners. We have a lot of room to sprint.”
AirWatch may need to sprint to keep up with MDM competitors who have also teamed up with multi-national software and hardware companies. FiberLink is now part of IBM and Citrix acquired Xenprise last year. “With over 70-plus MDM/MAM vendors positioning themselves as a [bring-your-own-device] solution, expect to see a lot of consolidation as vendors buy up market share and technology with procurement costs slowly coming down,” said Andrew Maguire of RedSeal Networks.
For mobile operators, MDM can be a key part of the enterprise offering. AirWatch has white labeled its MDM solution for Telstra in Australia, and Marshall says the company sees a growing opportunity in the telecom market.
“The telcos are getting more comfortable,’ he said “It takes a long time to integrate billing, provisioning, kind of the heavy lifting behind the scenes. The work that we’ve been doing the past two years is really there now.”
