Is AirWatch or AirWatch Express dead or something?
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Not sure who all here has experience with AirWatch...
I've been attempting to try out AirWatch for my company since early last week. I signed up for the 30-day trial on their website but never heard back from a sales rep, which is really odd because usually salespeople are all over any hint of product interest and I have to fight them off with a stick.
After a few calls back to vmware, I finally got someone to help me only to have them tell me that someone else would have to help me. Then, that other person eventually got back to me but then after a few days, he handed me off to another guy who was the sales specialist for my area. He basically just copied the guy on an email and then I didn't hear from the guy until I initiated yet another email asking to have a trial set up. Then he finally response with a very short email asking the number of users. I tell him that info, plus my needs and then he just suggests that I try AirWatch Express first which I set up myself and does not need the involvement of anyone from vmware.
So I go through and set up AirWatch Express and it seems to work fine, except certain things don't fully work the way we need. I spend hours going through documentation and the knowledge base only to realize that most this stuff is not specifically for AirWatch Express, it's just for regular AirWatch. I mean, they seem to be about the same, except Express has a lot less features. I did find one section on Express (a kb filter) but nothing ever shows up.
Anyway, after a long time of dicking with Express, I decided I want to just try the trial of regular AirWatch. So I emailed the guy back and have yet to hear from him.. granted it's only been about 6 hours so far this time, so I'm just being patient for now.
So one thought that crossed my mind: Is AirWatch or AirWatch Express even alive anymore? Or is it just one of those "ghost ship" products where they keep it alive to suck in money, but that nobody really supports... I mean, I noticed the website seems pretty slow too and graphics don't always load the first time. Seems really odd over-all.
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I just also asked this question elsewhere and had someone tell me that AirWatch is the Wal-Mart of MDM services and that they will only care about me if I'm a big company that's actually worth it for them to bother with. Then they suggested MobileIron for MDM.
That's definitely the impression I get so far..
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@dave247 said in Is AirWatch or AirWatch Express dead or something?:
I just also asked this question elsewhere and had someone tell me that AirWatch is the Wal-Mart of MDM services and that they will only care about me if I'm a big company that's actually worth it for them to bother with. Then they suggested MobileIron for MDM.
That's definitely the impression I get so far..
If that other place happens to be spicy, I would throw out the info gathered there.
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@rojoloco said in Is AirWatch or AirWatch Express dead or something?:
@dave247 said in Is AirWatch or AirWatch Express dead or something?:
I just also asked this question elsewhere and had someone tell me that AirWatch is the Wal-Mart of MDM services and that they will only care about me if I'm a big company that's actually worth it for them to bother with. Then they suggested MobileIron for MDM.
That's definitely the impression I get so far..
If that other place happens to be spicy, I would throw out the info gathered there.
No it's not [moderated to remove name we aren't allowed to mention]. And for the record, I have gotten some good help from that community.
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@dave247 I think you mean "the site that shall not be named". They've been acting like a bunch of bitches about that lately. And I know for a fact they have spies amongst us. <tags redacted>
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@rojoloco said in Is AirWatch or AirWatch Express dead or something?:
@dave247 I think you mean "the site that shall not be named". They've been acting like a bunch of bitches about that lately. And I know for a fact they have spies amongst us. <tags redacted>
Probably because of Scott's unprecedented level of posts there, lol.
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Pinging VMware reps... @StorageNinja @NetworkNerd
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@dave247 said in Is AirWatch or AirWatch Express dead or something?:
@rojoloco said in Is AirWatch or AirWatch Express dead or something?:
@dave247 I think you mean "the site that shall not be named". They've been acting like a bunch of bitches about that lately. And I know for a fact they have spies amongst us. <tags redacted>
Probably because of Scott's unprecedented level of posts there, lol.
Yeah, that's what it is.
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Here's a good example of why I'm confused and concerned:
I thought I would see about pricing information for if/when I decide to go with AirWatch or AirWatch Express.
From the actual AirWatch Express portal (I'm on the 30-day trial), I can click on the "AirWatch Express" graphic link which takes me to https://www.air-watch.com, which seems to be presenting both AirWatch and Workspace ONE (but mostly ONE). So I click on pricing, which takes me to https://www.air-watch.com/pricing which displays Workspace ONE prices, not actually AirWatch prices... but then at the bottom it says, "AirWatch management suites are still available". Clicking on that takes me to https://www.air-watch.com/airwatch-pricing which provides a different set of prices: Green, Orange, Blue and Yellow. And this page has a link to view comparison of the AirWatch Suites, which doesn't seem to give too much more information, then has a "read more" link, which directs back to the Workspace ONE pricing. So it's like a circular progression of links that point to un-related products and pricing...
Also, at https://airwatchexpress.com/pricing which actually has the pricing info for Express... I click on "Buy Now" which takes me to a checkout page that has completely broken CSS... I mean, I'm sure the page still works, but it's just kind of a red flag to me.
Anyway, just wanted to vent the day's frustration..
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Couple things....
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If you are in the America's your email's may have fallen into the hell that is trying to reach field during Sales Kick office, and TechSummit (The only reason you'd see me and NetworkNerd fly into Toronto in the dead of winter).
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For Commercial accounts (where you fall if you are small) you should talk to a partner (Ask the rep who the best partner is in the area). Partners tend to lead engagements (They have staff who are trained, resources etc). Commercial AE/SE's have a really wide mapping in channel sales driven companies (Which is most that are profitable and not startups burning VC cash). If you are a mid-sized account, then it's generally a joint engagement, if you are an enterprise then you tend to work primarily with the AE/SE's direct on everything and occasionally a partner.
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What is it exactly you want to do with AirWatch? It's kinda the only serious game in town for MDM with diverse hardware platforms (Good and Best have kinda left the market).
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When you buy Airwatch it's normally sold with deployment services. You have the guys in Atlanta (technically Alpharetta) set it up for you, and a PM keeps the project on track. Got an opportunity to go to ATL and talk to these guys a while back (Cross trained them on some vSAN deployments) and honestly given the opportunity of learning every quirk of MDM vs. just having someone who's a pro set up the 90% of stuff I'll never need to touch again I'd go that route.
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In general with MDM where people get in trouble is trying to do it 100% themselves (this goes back to my BES days). It's shockingly easy for an untrained person in a MDM to start clicking on things and make a smartphone dumb (This reminds me of what happens when non-experienced people muck in GPO). Airwatch is better than most, but I just wouldn't waste my time with it vs. getting the PSO guys to do it for you.
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@storageninja Thanks.
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@storageninja said in Is AirWatch or AirWatch Express dead or something?:
Couple things....
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If you are in the America's your email's may have fallen into the hell that is trying to reach field during Sales Kick office, and TechSummit (The only reason you'd see me and NetworkNerd fly into Toronto in the dead of winter).
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For Commercial accounts (where you fall if you are small) you should talk to a partner (Ask the rep who the best partner is in the area). Partners tend to lead engagements (They have staff who are trained, resources etc). Commercial AE/SE's have a really wide mapping in channel sales driven companies (Which is most that are profitable and not startups burning VC cash). If you are a mid-sized account, then it's generally a joint engagement, if you are an enterprise then you tend to work primarily with the AE/SE's direct on everything and occasionally a partner.
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What is it exactly you want to do with AirWatch? It's kinda the only serious game in town for MDM with diverse hardware platforms (Good and Best have kinda left the market).
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When you buy Airwatch it's normally sold with deployment services. You have the guys in Atlanta (technically Alpharetta) set it up for you, and a PM keeps the project on track. Got an opportunity to go to ATL and talk to these guys a while back (Cross trained them on some vSAN deployments) and honestly given the opportunity of learning every quirk of MDM vs. just having someone who's a pro set up the 90% of stuff I'll never need to touch again I'd go that route.
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In general with MDM where people get in trouble is trying to do it 100% themselves (this goes back to my BES days). It's shockingly easy for an untrained person in a MDM to start clicking on things and make a smartphone dumb (This reminds me of what happens when non-experienced people muck in GPO). Airwatch is better than most, but I just wouldn't waste my time with it vs. getting the PSO guys to do it for you.
Thanks for the reply. I guess #1 makes sense why I'm not hearing back from anyone lately.
As for what we want to do with AirWatch... We currently run IBM's MaaS360 for our MDM product and we use it for general MDM and secure email/document/browser. We have a small environment with about 55 devices (it fluxuates) and the cost of MaaS360 has gotten pretty outrageous. This is why I'm trying to test out AirWatch.
We set up MaaS360 ourselves and it wasn't very difficult. Additionally, I have set up AirWatch Express and added a handful of test devices and it was quite easy to do. Its just that there are limitations on Express and I think regular AirWatch would be better to meet our needs. Those needs are: secure container with the AirWatch inbox/browser/etc. And as far as I can tell, Express only works with the device's native email client.
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@dave247 said in Is AirWatch or AirWatch Express dead or something?:
We set up MaaS360 ourselves and it wasn't very difficult. Additionally, I have set up AirWatch Express and added a handful of test devices and it was quite easy to do. Its just that there are limitations on Express and I think regular AirWatch would be better to meet our needs. Those needs are: secure container with the AirWatch inbox/browser/etc. And as far as I can tell, Express only works with the device's native email client.
It's been 3 years since I did airwatch training, but from memory here, you would need full airwatch to create a separate container.
The Boxer Mail Client VMware bought is actually quite nice and comparable to Inbox by Google (I generally wanted to extract rage on some other MDM's mail clients I've used). The auto-tunneling browser and app stuff, as well as the container to separate work vs. personal makes usability quite nice.
I'll be in Atlanta next month (Got a conference downtown) but I'll see if I can meet those guys for drinks and figure out what they are up to. Their R&D office is really damn cool (The first floor was a trading floor for commodities they somehow put enough soundproofing in to adopt into one giant room with hundreds of engineers).
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I think you will begin to hear more about Workspace ONE powered by Airwatch rather than Airwatch as a separate product (https://www.vmware.com/products/workspace-one.html). There's a large amount of work being done around managing Windows 10 devices too (moving to Unified Endpoint Management instead of just traditional MDM, things like ability to manage BitLocker keys).
There were some platform announcements yesterday as well - https://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2018/03/workspace-one-intelligence-march-announcement.html.
But I'd stick with @StorageNinja's advice on being patient for a response.
