VMware has struggled to bring end users under the authority of its x86 virtualized datacenter. AirWatch could be the missing element.
VMware’s purchase of mobile device management and mobile security vendor AirWatch, announced January 22, raises two big questions.
First, how is AirWatch different from its other end-user oriented acquisitions, akin to SlideRocket, which it held for under two years before divesting? Indeed, it shed SlideRocket with out clear return at the investment.
Second, VMware paid a premium at $1.54 billion for a 1,600-employee company. What did it get besides increasing VMware’s headcount? Does AirWatch fit into the entire VMware strategy better than SlideRocket and Zimbra did?
AirWatch is another variety of end-user company from SlideRocket, which VMware purchased in 2011 when then-CEO Paul Maritz was looking for the top-user applications that could lure the loads onto virtualized desktops. Maritz is gone, moved directly to head the Pivotal spinoff, and so are the top-user application acquisitions.
[Wish to learn more about how VMware balances R&D and acquisitions? See VMware Navigates High Wire Act.]
AirWatch isn’t much an end-user application as an end-user management system. VMware already has its Horizon View end-user virtual desktop infrastructure, but it’s oriented to an x86-based desktop and laptop world, similar to VMware server virtualization. AirWatch is a BYOD system that recognizes Apple laptops and iPhones, Androids, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and Symbian mobile devices.
AirWatch is systems management for small systems, something like VMware’s vSphere and the vCloud Suite are systems management for terribly large clusters of servers. AirWatch can hooked up and manage somebody workspace, mobile security, mobile applications on a tool, and the content fed to the appliance.
It’s a possible complement to a different VMware purchase, last October, of multitenant desktop supplier, Desktone. Like AirWatch, Desktone moved VMware clear of the x86-based end user into the sector of BYOD. It also moved VMware off-premises and into the cloud. Desktone could convey a desktop from a remote datacenter “to any user, anywhere on any device,” its CEO Peter Kaye boasted in October.
Desktone was a pioneer of the concept desktops should be provisioned and administered from the cloud, and launched the approach as a product line in 2006. Along the best way, it amassed customers including cloud service providers IBM, Dell, NaviSite, and Dimension Data, and Fujitsu, Logicalis, NEC, and Quest. Its cloud operations were largely in line with open source code. Regardless of how VMware shuffled its predecessor VDI elements, it couldn’t match those economics.
In an identical vein, AirWatch is not only another BYOD company, but among the leading companies relating to its customer base. Its customers include United and Delta airlines, InterContinental Hotels Group, Walgreens, Lowes, ING, Royal Caribbean, the united states Army Corps of Engineers, and several other medical device manufacturers who decline to be named.
VMware pays quite a bit for its acquisitions but, as well as products, it’s buying two things: a braintrust for a desired new market, and credibility in that area through an existing customer base. It did so with its $1.26 billion Nicira purchase to get into software-defined networking. It’s doing so again with the AirWatch acquisition.
VMware treats these acquisitions something like EMC treated VMware because it was brought into the fold. AirWatch co-founder and CEO John Marshall will continue to steer his team in Atlanta. He’s going to report back to Sanjay Poonen, executive VP and general manager of VMware’s End User Computing Group, the veteran from SAP end-user computing. Co-founder and chairman Alan Dabbiere will oversee AirWatch’s operating board and should report back to VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger. Everyone at AirWatch has a VMware boss, however the supervision is loosely coupled in the course of the company’s founders.
If VMware thought that its future was within the enterprise datacenter, its area of greatest success, it wouldn’t be making purchases like Desktone and AirWatch. In reality, its strategy for both server and end-user computing has moved beyond the software-defined data center. For 2 years, that phrase encapsulated everything that VMware planned to do with the virtualized-server side of its business. Now it’s bidding to rope in virtualized users who’re not just outside the datacenter, but frequently off the reservation entirely.
VMware, despite a strict x86 heritage, understands that the long run desktop isn’t a spot or particular device, but one of the possibilities inside the hands of a mobile worker. And it knows that managing that desktop must occur alongside x86 server, storage, and networking operations, possibly at the same pane of glass.
AirWatch consolidates the management of many dissimilar devices right into a single management interface. Is it the tip-user computing elixir that VMware was in quest of in its SlideRocket-like acquisitions? No, it’s still a miles cry from being the solution to VMware’s end-user computing problem.
But if AirWatch’s mobile end-user management can also be combined with Desktone’s cloud provisioning and operations, besides elements of VMware’s Horizon View VDI, then VMware may finally be putting together the pieces of a posh puzzle.
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Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek, having joined the publication in 2003. He’s the previous editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld and previous technology editor of Interactive Week. He’s a graduate of Syracuse … View Full Bio
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