VMware bets big on AirWatch to boost app publishing capabilities

AirWatch was acquired early this year for approximately $1.5 billion

Nasdaq-listed VMware Inc, a virtualisation and cloud infrastructure company, is betting big on the core competencies of AirWatch, which it had acquired early this year for approximately $1.5 billion, to provide its customers with a complete solution to manage users, devices and applications across desktop and mobile environments.

Atlanta-based, privately-held AirWatch is a provider of enterprise solutions for mobile device management, mobile application management and mobile content management. It has more than 10,000 customers globally and over 1,600 employees across nine global offices, including in Bangalore.

VMware, with revenues exceeding $5 billion in 2013, employs over 13,000 professional globally. Of this, over 2,200 employees work out of India, including from its R&D centres in Bangalore and Pune.

“From an integration stand point, we understood the areas VMware and AirWatch are strong at and are combining these capabilities. Our vision is to develop a single management console,” said Ramesh Vantipalli, head EUC (end-user computing), India and South, VMware.

“With this single management console, you can manage all the way from a physical desktop, virtual desktop to an offline BYOD (bring-your-own-device) to end-point mobile devices. In fact, we are doing a lot of R&D for converging these technologies together and will launch them by the end of this year.”

According to Vantipalli, VMware was looking at unifying this management so that it becomes easy for organisations to adopt these technologies. Also, it is planning on how to make social collaboration to be integrated as part of the daily life of an employee with this technology.

“AirWatch has the capabilities to seamlessly deliver corporate enterprise applications. It will control the asset – not just mobile devices but even the laptops. We are also venturing into (laptops) providing control to the end users. In a nutshell, we want to provide a freedom to the end user and at the same time ensure that IT has a full control on this,” he added.