By Lanier Norville, AirWatch by VMware
Last year at Mobile World Congress, we saw enterprise mobility emerge as a central theme, and it’s clear the enterprise space is only picking up steam. Many of this year’s biggest headline-makers, from device launches to educational sessions, demonstrated that enterprise demand is now driving the mobile market. As Forrester analysts note, it’s clear the enterprise mobile mind shift is well underway.
Last year, sessions focused on the importance of secure mobile access to email, documents and other business tools, and executives pontificated on the mobile-cloud future. This year, experts discussed how those tools are revolutionizing business processes and driving innovation. As Constellation Research founder Ray Wang noted in his keynote this Monday at AirWatch Connect, mobile is now driving the creation of entirely new business models.
AirWatch Connect was the enterprise center of Mobile World Congress. The conference featured speakers from Gartner, Forrester and other leading analyst firms, as well as executives from Google, Samsung, AT&T, Box and Salesforce. Two VMware executives broke away from the conference to take the main stage at Mobile World Congress. CEO Pat Gelsinger presented “The New Mobile Identity” and Senior VP Shekar Ayyar presented “Enabling M&A for Industry Growth.” AirWatch also took the main stage at the GSMA awards, where GSMA named AirWatch Enterprise Mobility Management the “Best Mobile Cloud Service or App” in the 2015 awards.
Here are a few of the enterprise mobility highlights from AirWatch Connect and Mobile World Congress this week:
- Samsung released the latest edition of its flagship device. The enterprise-grade Galaxy S6 sports a new design and runs the latest version of Samsung Knox, 2.4, which AirWatch will support.
- Microsoft released two new Lumia devices, along with an update to its Windows Phone 8.1 operating system. The update includes several new enterprise features, for which AirWatch provided same-day support.
- Google executives revealed more details about Android for Work on the AirWatch Connect stage. AirWatch was one of the first EMM providers Google began working with on the new enterprise initiative, as Andrew Toy notes in this video.
- AirWatch, Box, Cisco, Workday and Xamarin launched App Configuration for Enterprise (ACE), an open-standards approach to building management and security features into enterprise apps. ACE provides a universal set of standards that enterprise app developers and EMM vendors can use to integrate security and management features into apps.
It’s been a big week for enterprise mobility. Thanks to the 5,000 attendees and 24 partners that helped make AirWatch Connect the epicenter of enterprise mobility at Mobile World Congress. For more coverage, read our day one, day two and day three highlights.
