AirWatch Catches Forrester Wave

Customers don’t always have time to vet every single possible vendor and CIOs hate to be blamed for a bad purchase.

That’s why there is so much focus on the analysis of firms like Gartner, IDC and Forrester. No wonder Mobility Management vendor AirWatch is crowing about being a named a “strong performer” in the recent Forrester Wave: File Sync and Share Platforms, Q3 2013 report. This comes on top of recent kudos from Red Herring and Gartner, which we’ll get to later. AirWatch may have been a strong performer, but it was edged out by seven stronger performers.

Box came out on top as a leader, followed by fellow leaders IBM and EMC. Topping the strong performer rankings were Accellion, Citrix, Egnyte and WatchDox.  AirWatch came in with a pack of what Forrester calls “the middle of Strong Performers” which also included Alfresco, DropBox and Salesforce.com.

AirWatch, which focuses a lot on Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) and Mobile Device Management (MDM), is happy to be in the middle of this relatively young market. “Three things define AirWatch’s sweet spot in this market: a strong focus on mobile scenarios with its integrated mobile device management solution; the ability to deploy in a hybrid model, with files and metadata in the cloud or on-premises; and experience securing company-owned and employee-owned devices,” wrote authors Ted Schadler and Rob Koplowitz.

As MSP Today recently reported, AirWatch was chosen 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.

Gartner also likes what it sees, and the MDM company was called “outstanding” in Gartner’s most recent Critical Capabilities for Mobile Device Management report. But the Magic Quadrant is what vendors really covet and here AirWatch 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. 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.