AirWatch by VMware Exec: Business Transformation Comes From the Top

IT is moving away from mobile device management (MDM) and heading toward enterprise mobility management (EMM), a shift in vision for both administrators and vendors. But while EMM vendors and IT administrators are leading the charge, where do customers stand?

AirWatch by VMware Senior Vice President and General Manager John Marshall told MSPmentor during an interview that some customers are now viewing mobility management through a new lens, where a strategic, not tactical, approach is required.

Click here for MSPmentor’s mid-year review of the EMM market

Instead of worrying only about managing devices, these customers are looking at the bigger picture — “changing the way they do business,” he said.

The conversation with customers has grown from talking about basic MDM features to understanding complex EMM platform capabilities — one of the reasons why IT research firm Gartner, Inc. (IT) changed its focus from MDM to EMM.

The new mobility discussion includes an interest in “pushing applications, business continuity, change management, getting content and critical applications to the device,” Marshall said.

He added: “That’s really the shift that’s happened.”

But that’s not the case with all customers, only the top 10 to 20 percent: “The ones that really get it were the ones that bought two or three years ago and had an executive sponsorship,” he said. (By “executive sponsorship”, Marshall means that executives were spearheading mobility initiatives.)

Click here for MSPmentor’s mid-year review of the EMM market

Customers that don’t understand how EMM can transform the entire business workflow, those at the bottom part of the scale, are still thinking in the tactical sense (i.e., worrying about remote lock and wipe features), he said. This is where the push to an EMM platform comes from the bottom of an organization, not the top.

The majority of customers — the ones that fall right in the middle of the scale — have worked out a strategy throughout their divisions, but they don’t have an overall strategy to tie everything together. 

“Our business is not exactly the transformation, that has to come from the executives talking to their peers in the industry, getting educated by others,” Marshall said, “but we can certainly help paint the vision.”

Marshall said customers are “becoming more sophisticated in their requirements and their desire to scale these mobile deployments” in an April interview with MSPmentor.

Marshall was president and CEO of AirWatch before it was acquired by VMware (VMW) in January. He continues to lead the EMM platform provider in his new role.

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