Two companies not particularly known for their footprints in the mobile software world, VMware and Hewlett-Packard, are nonetheless joining their talents to bring a new converged enterprise mobile management package into the market.
VMware contributes to the mobile management software with its February acquisition Airwatch, and HP–which can’t match that kind of new-gen software–has the global mobile enterprise services to add the support that VMware lacks.
The new capabilities create more choices for users by adding on-demand cloud delivery to the existing HP managed cloud and on-premises options, Jeff Carlat, HP director of Converged Systems Product Management, told eWEEK.
VMware made the announcement Oct. 15 at its VMworld conference in Barcelona.
HP Managed Mobility Services packages with the AirWatch management platform will include:
—Management Essentials, which deploy full-featured enterprise mobile device and application management without infrastructure or capital investment; and
—Trusted App Access to enable secure access and single sign-on to applications, flexibility for users to run apps from any source, and enable BYO devices to run enterprise corporate applications and store data securely on a device.
The AirWatch by VMware platform offers solutions for mobile device, application, email, browser and content management and is used by more than 13,000 organizations in 150 countries.
Airwatch competes in the same MDM (mobile device management) market with Citrix Systems (which makes Xenprise), SAP Sybase, Perimeter, IBM/Fiberlink, Oracle/Bitzer, Continuum, Good Technology and MobileIron. AirWatch’s platform is scalable, secure and hybrid, in that the same code sets can run in a data center and in the cloud.
The increasing use worldwide of personal smartphones and tablets by employees in the enterprise is bewildering IT and security managers, thus requiring companies in all sectors to utilize new data-sharing and security approaches. AirWatch provides VMware with the in-house tools needed to manage these tasks in addition to opening a set of new markets for the Palo Alto, Calif.-based software maker.