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Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) vendors will close out 2017 by generating $1.8 billion in sales for the year, a nine percent increase compared to 2016, according to a forecast from Strategy Analytics. By 2022, the market research firm expects sales to climb to $2.2 billion.
VMware AirWatch is the current EMM king, having captured 19 percent of the market in 2016. On Oct. 31, the company announced the release of VMware AirWatch 9.2, featuring an integration with VMware’s identity and access management, Workspace ONE, and expanded PC management capabilities for Windows 10, macOS and Chrome OS.
Close behind is BlackBerry (18 percent), which acquired Good Technology in 2015. Although the company’s phone business is a shadow of its former, high-flying self, the company appears to have found its niche in EMM solutions.
On Sept. 28, BlackBerry announced record software and services revenues of $196 million, a 26 percent year-over-year increase, for the company’s fiscal 2018 second quarter. “We achieved historical highs in total software and services revenue and gross margin, as well as the highest non-GAAP operating margin in over five years, reflecting our complete transformation to a software company,” remarked BlackBerry CEO John Chen.
MobileIron, Citrix and Microsoft round out the top five, each with market shares hovering at or near 10 percent. Strategy Analytics noted that several well-known technology companies, including, IBM, SAP, Sophos and Symantec are battling out for the remaining 35 percent.
In the meantime, EMM solutions are evolving from their mobile device management (MDM) roots. Whereas early MDM solutions generally offered businesses a way to manage employees’ smartphones and tablets, today’s EMM solutions are serving a bigger role as centralized hubs that enable IT departments to control how their users connect to enterprise IT resources and data.
The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which is set to take effect in just over six months, will help make EMM a must-have at many businesses, according to Andrew Brown, executive director of Enterprise Research at Strategy Analytics.
“EMM solutions are an important component of a GDPR-compliant security program,” stated Brown. “An enterprise that does not use EMM effectively may find it challenging to justify to authorities why it did not technical measures to mitigate the risk of data loss in cases of a breach, especially when the new European General Data Protection Regulation legislation will go live in May 2018.”
Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Datamation. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.
