Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) and Mobile Device Management (MDM) company AirWatch was recently chosen as a winner in the annual Red Herring Top 100 North America Award. The list focuses on private technology companies with promising futures, and often focuses on early stage outfits, which the MDM veteran AirWatch clearly is not.
“The Top 100 were selected on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, innovation, quality of management, IP creation, CAGR, execution of strategy, and disruption in their respective industries,” Red Herring said.
The Red Herring Award is all well and good, but Gartner has far more clout with customers. And here AirWatch was anointed as “outstanding” in Gartner’s most recent Critical Capabilities for Mobile Device Management report.
Pictured: Gartner’s MDM Magic Quadrant
The report rated AirWatch on use cases (excellent), product viability (outstanding) and seven other categories. All together, the AirWatch product was rated as “excellent” and Gartner said AirWatch has great mobile device management.
AirWatch also made it into the top portion of this year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for MDM as a “leader.”
Gartner noted that AirWatch, based in Atlanta, has been on an international expansion tear with new data centers in Australia, Europe and India.
And last year, the number or AirWatch customers soared by more than double.
While AirWatch offers on-premises MDM tools, a solid majority of clients opted for the cloud.
“AirWatch's enterprise MDM offering has broad MDM functional breadth and maturity, including enhanced mobile security, application security and management, mobile content management (through Secure Content Locker) and mobile email management, as well as enterprise back-end infrastructure integration,” Gartner enthused.
Gartner takes a balanced view of vendors, first looking at strengths, then adding a few notes of caution.
On a positive note, “AirWatch has aggressive pricing and great flexibility in software and service licensing in individual contracts that meet most industry- or company-specific requirements,” the research said.
Gartner also liked the AirWatch cloud. “The vendor offers a layered approach in its cloud model, including via traditional implementation in its own data center in Atlanta, through infrastructure as a service (e.g., with AT&T, Telstra and Verizon Terremark) and through Amazon Web Services (AWS) in selected countries.”
So what should customers and partners look out for? “Despite the strong focus on customer support and great account management (often with the direct involvement of the CEO), occasionally reference feedback has been suboptimal, with negative experiences specifically regarding implementation and post-sales technical support for on-premises installations and upgrades,” Gartner cautioned.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
