VMware AirWatch is the market leader and has the customer success stories to prove it. They have deployed large numbers of devices and successfully demonstrated the ability to scale. With VMware as the parent company, it makes sense that AirWatch will be around for a while to come.
VMware acquired popular mobile device management (MDM) suite AirWatch (which begins at $4.33 per device per month) approximately three years ago. For VMware, aiming for the top and picking up the market leader (according to Gartner and others) was a key strategic move and the company has capitalized on it in spades. When we last reviewed it more than a year ago, we gave VMware AirWatch our Editors’ Choice award and rightly so. It remains at the top of the heap with this update. We put the latest version through its paces and found it to be one of, if not the, easiest-to-use MDM tools we tested. The VMware AirWatch Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application offers many of the same web-facing management tools you get from the other vendors in this review, including IBM MaaS360 and Microsoft Intune, especially when it’s combined with Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) Suite.
While other tools, such as Citrix XenMobile, have fallen back in the pack, the VMware lead has actually widened, at least from a capability perspective. Much of that is due to VMware’s Workspace One product, which brings the company’s identity management capabilities and its app management and delivery technology under one management umbrella.
That’s key, since it means combining VMware AirWatch and Workspace One lets administrators deliver and manage apps for both mobile and desktop machines. This blurs the lines between current MDM solutions and where the market seems to be headed, which is in the direction of simple device management regardless of form factor or mobile capabilities. Other vendors are bringing desktop management features to their products as well. Much of this comes from customer demand, from customers looking to consolidate the number of management consoles their IT staff must monitor.
Getting signed up for a VMware AirWatch trial demo takes just a few minutes on their website. Clicking on the Free Trial link launches a sign-up page where you must enter your contact info, including a company email address. The typical process includes a call from an account representative to better understand your needs. I was able to skip that step for this review and get straight to testing the product.
An introductory email includes links to a personalized website and log-in information. After getting past the log-in screen, I was greeted with a Getting Started page that included a number of steps that needed to be accomplished prior to registering devices. VMware AirWatch requires an Apple Push Notification (APN) certificate as does every other product in this comparison. To obtain that certificate, I had to first download the VMware AirWatch certificate request, which is then uploaded to an Apple website. The final step is to generate the APN certificate and register it for future use.
I went through the enrollment process on all three platforms to get a feel for the flow. For Android and Apple iOS, you can use a QR code provided in the enrollment email to fill in the necessary account information. On the Microsoft Windows 10 Mobile device, I had to manually enter the information from the Setup/Accounts page. This wasn’t a big deal but did require some additional steps not required on the other devices.
On Apple devices, you must first download the VMware AirWatch MDM app from the Apple Store and then launch the app to begin the registration process. The easiest way to do this is to use the QR code provided from the VMware AirWatch enrollment email to enter the necessary credentials. It is also possible to use the QR code on the other supported platforms as well. During the registration process, I was taken to the iPad settings screen where I had to okay and install the requisite VMware AirWatch services.
Enrolling an Android device also requires an app download from the Google Store, followed by a series of information pages. Once again, using the QR code helps eliminate any typing errors at this point. The last few steps involve approving the installation of the agent and a device-specific app, which takes care of locking and wiping, if necessary.
The dashboard on the VMware AirWatch console lets you quickly scan for problems based on colors. Red means something is wrong and helps to quickly identify where your focus should be. Clicking on any of the colors will drill down into that specific issue with more detailed information underneath. The interactive graphs are responsive, and each graphical widget can be customized to show the information in just the way you want to see it. New features include expanded reporting options plus the ability to deploy apps through the Workspace One unified app catalog.
It is a relatively simple process to create a policy to require a personal identification number (PIN) should the device not have one turned on. I created this for the Windows phone and clicked Publish. The next time the phone screen went blank, it required me to set a PIN upon waking up the phone. This does raise the issue of ensuring the phone is in the possession of the owner when this process is initiated.
Reporting is a key feature I wanted to evaluate for each vendor. VMware AirWatch detail screens include the ability to export the data to a CSV file to use in reporting or for further analysis. It’s also possible to build filters to show devices by any number of different categories to get a quick report on problems, compliancy issues, or any one of a number of custom attributes. New reports in the latest version add the ability to see app details by device, detailed device inventory, and more.
VMware AirWatch pricing starts at $4.33 per device per month and goes up to $9.33 per device per month for their full-featured cloud offering. On-premises pricing starts at $50 per device per year and goes up to $130 per device per year plus a maintenance fee.
VMware AirWatch provides everything you need to get control of your enterprise mobile devices.
