In the crowded mobile device management (MDM) market, AirWatch wants to stand out from the MDM crowd. “Nobody wants to be the T.J.Maxx of mobility,” quipped AirWatch Chairman Alan Dabbiere. In my opinion, the 300-person AirWatch team has been among the most active MDM companies this year.
Most recently, AirWatch launched a mobile device management solution for Microsoft BPOS-D, Office 365 and Google Gmail cloud services. Also, the company released an HTML5-based MDM platform and helped Southeastrans – a transportation management company — get its Net InSight Mobile App off the ground.
Dabbiere says AirWatch is vertically agnostic and the company pursues customers in all different sectors. Still, it seems to me that AirWatch’s bread-and-butter is the retail industry. AirWatch currently has 1,500 customers — including five of the top 10 retailers in the United States: Lowes, Home Depot, Sears, Target and Best Buy. And AirWatch is aggressively pursuing the other five, according to Dabbiere. “We just signed Wal-Mart, we’re about to sign two more of the top ten and we’re talking to the other two,” he said. Seventy percent of AirWatch clients have adopted the company’s Software-as-a-Service model, while 30 percent remain on-premise.
So how has AirWatch managed to horde those retail giants away MDM rivals? “We’ve pull away from competitors in terms of capabilities of our product,” Dabbiere said. “Others don’t have the scalability to do what we do. And we can charge $40 per device whereas others are in the $70-80 range because we sell twice as much.”
Don’t expect AirWatch’s sales goals to slow down anytime soon. The company plans to expand from 300 to 600 employees in the next year and is planning new updates when Apple releases iOS 5.
Still, competition looms. For instance:
- Virtela launched a white label MDM solution for VARs and MSPs in April 2011.
- SAP is planning a strategy around the Unwired Platform; the effort will target MSPs.
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Posted In: Managed Security Services | Managed Services | Mobile | North America | Platforms | Software as a Service and Hardware as a Service
Tags: AirWatch | Alan Dabbiere | MAM | MDM | mobile application management | mobile device management | Office 365 | retail vertical | SaaS | SAP Virtel
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I know of one of these big retail chains that is shopping for another vendor due to the lack of scalability of this product. After they hit about 7000 devices, the AirWatch product was brought to it’s knees. The only way to solve this issue was to add an additional instance of AirWatch. This product cannot scale. Also, the company was built to flip. They are not in it for the long haul. They will sell out to a larger company soon and then their product will really go downhill fast. Buyers beware.
John,
We welcome reader comments — even factual constructive criticism. But can you please disclose your company association? Are you an AirWatch customer? Rival? Consultant? Comments that lack such disclosures are removed from MSPmentor within 24 hours.
-jp
On the contrary, AirWatch is highly scalable, with numerous global Fortune 100 customers relying on AirWatch to secure, monitor, manage and support their large, diverse fleets of mobile devices.
AirWatch’s scalable, cloud-based solution is designed to support an unlimited number of devices, and the multi-tenant architecture allows for one instance of the software to support multiple organizations or groups within a large organization. Each tier provides an additional layer of security, configuration, customization and access control.
AirWatch’s SaaS offering featuring best-in-class hosting and network operations, including multiple redundant data centers, high availability architecture; disaster recovery; industry-leading hardware from Cisco, F5 and Dell; 24/7 Atlanta-based network operations center; monitoring and alerting tools; and multi-tenant architecture.
One large DIY retailer uses AirWatch to manage more than 50,000 mobile devices across their store operations, with these devices averaging more than 100,000 mobile POS transactions per week. Another large global customer, a diverse carbonated beverage manufacturer and bottler, relies on AirWatch to manage their global fleet of mobile devices, which numbers more than 60,000.
Furthermore, AirWatch is DEFINITELY not built to flip; rather it is built to last.
100% of the company is owned by management, with no outside capital or debt. Furthermore, the executive team previously established (with no outside capital) and led Manhattan Associates (NASDAQ: MANH), the global leader in distribution and logistics solutions, which was extremely successful and was profitable every single quarter during the founder’s 14-year tenure.
Leveraging their proven experience in scaling enterprise software companies, the AirWatch management team has successfully doubled the company’s revenue in each of the last three years and taken the company from only 40 employees in 2008 to more than 300 today. AirWatch has the industry’s large development team, with 150 dedicated, in-house developers. It’s an exciting time to be in mobility and we look forward to helping our growing user community simplify enterprise mobility.
50,000 devices is pretty impressive, would the person who sent this post give details as from all data I could gather from talking with AW partners and customers the platform does not scale to this extent. The customer mentioned is likely a legacy wandering wifi customer, maybe you can confirm this is not the case and provide proof? The platforms you are managing at this customer are likely legacy platforms not what is being deployed today such as android and iOS, maybe you could comment on this, from what I could find out no DIY company has deployed anywhere near this number of modern smartphone or tab devices. please also comment what on earth AW has got to do with how many POS transactions a device can do, this I believe is irrelevant data.
I have been lead to believe that the data tha AW provides stretches the truth, a great example of thus is AW telling customers how they could push iOS applications to iOS devices, when clearly they were just pushing web clips. As far as scalability is concerned I am sure AW could get past 7k devices but with the device sync interval set to 36 hours how hard can that be !!
Also impressive growth but the company was failing as a hot spot management company and morphed in to what it is now so be careful before you believe that the management team are super successful, the last gig did not go so well. Final comment , 150 developers the largest in the industry ! — how does the author firstly know how many developers other companies have and secondly has the delusion that Sybase or Intel or Microsoft who are all competitors are not bigger.