VMware and business mobility in APAC

VMware is realigning its business mobile offering so that it would be better able address the USD24 billion Asia opportunity that VMware believes will emerge next year.

According to VMware’s Managing Director for End User Computing (EUC) in APJ, Sanjay Deshmukh, out of the overall APAC shipment of 700 million smartphones a year, China is responsible for 400 million.

“China and Asia are driving business mobility around the world. Already businesses see mobility not just as a necessity, but a priority for them.”

This is also the reason behind VMware realigning their go-to-market strategy in Asia Pacific and Japan and this region only by combining their mobile and desktop go-to-market teams.

(L-R): Sanjay Deshmukh and Johnson Xu, Director in Greater China for VMware’s EUC

Deshmukh said, “We do believe there is this convergence at the customer end, of these two technologies (mobile and desktop).”

According to VMware’s global customer survey, 15- to 17-percent of them are really benefitting from business mobility initiatives, but around 85-percent have yet to embrace it completely. “These 85-percent are individual employees accessing office apps via mobile, so it’s really just individual employee productivity gains.

“The remainder who have embraced business mobility, have transformed their business instead,” Deshmukh pointed out.

Offerings

To help move things along for business mobility adoption, VMware has also released the industry’s first Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS) that is integrated with their enterprise-level mobility management and security solution, Airwatch Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM).

“VMware Identity Management technology, as a concept is not new. In the enterprise, it is used in a traditional manner. What we are doing, is bringing it to mobile and offer it as a service.”

What this technology proposes to do is offer single-sign on capability across all applications, and combine this with access control (based on users and devices) for more enhanced security. This solution is also available in an on-premise version.

The second piece of offering VMware now offers, is not based on any new tech, but is a combination of solutions – Airwatch EMM and VMware’s software defined networking technology, NSX.

Deshmukh explained, “The value (of this) to customers is the higher level of security. For example, a management dashboard with six KPIs, where in real-time, an administrator can configure security policies and apply them, with micro segmentation technology.”

Deshmukh had defined Airwatch EMM as an integrated mobility platform solution that is powered by VMware’s one cloud infrastructure that is based on the software-defined data centre.