AirWatch Exec Offers Enterprise Mobility Management Market Perspective

The enterprise mobility management (EMM) market and the technology providers that lead this market are reshaping themselves day by day, but who are the people behind the scenes pulling the strings? And what’s next for this market that has seen both consolidation and growth?

“The customers are now becoming more sophisticated in their requirements and their desire to scale these mobile deployments, and that requires more of a platform approach,” AirWatch by VMware Senior Vice President and General Manager John Marshall told MSPmentor during an interview. 

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

“It’s very difficult to provide a unified solution, cobbling together lots of different solutions with lots of different integration points and moving as quickly as you need to move in this market when you’ve got fragmented pieces,” he said.

In order to satisfy the demands of larger customers, players in the space will need to have access to global resources for research and development (R&D), delivery and support, Marshall pointed out.

“All of those things scream for larger players that can now step up to the plate and deliver these types of scaled global projects,” he said.

Other recent consolidation in the EMM market includes tech giant IBM (IBM) acquiring Fiberlink Communications back in November 2013.

But not every vendor in the EMM market is looking to become acquired. For example, MobileIron announced its plans to take the company public a couple of weeks ago. It hopes to raise $100 million in an initial public offering (IPO).

“It absolutely doesn’t mean that everybody is going to be gobbled up,” Marshall said. “It just means that either you’re going to be part of a big platform, or you’re going to be a niche player and you’re going to fill a subset of a defined market.”

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