Speculation: Gartner's recent negative view on VMware's innovation capabilities caused VMware management to freak out and go out and buy anything "innovative" that was for sale in the mobility arena. Mobility is hot, and VMware wants have a piece of the cake.
That's a really simplistic speculation. VMware management is considerably more measured than that. VMware has had an End-User-Computing units for years now. With more computing done on mobile and less on PCs, it stands to reason that VMware would like to move in that direction too for their EUC group, especially if the disruption upends the entrenched position Citrix has had on the PC.
They're trying to build an end-user computing portfolio. Citrix has a pretty good story with Xenprise.
MDM is a crowded space without alot of differentiation, and the big players are all moving in to soak up market leaders. Citrix bought Zenprise last year. IBM bought MaaS360 a few months ago. I'm sure MobileIron is next.
From my point of view MDM is more and more getting legacy and most corporations have already chosen a MDM platform, MobileIron has to hurry to find a vendor who is late to this market - like Microsoft maybe?
Virtual enterprises through BYOD. VMware provides you a client on whatever you want (laptop, tablet, phone), manages the device management, virtual apps on their server. I've used VMWare View Client to connect to a remote machine a few times from my iPad, and while it's not ideal for large amounts of work, it has saved a few vacations from total ruin, even over LTE. Providing the client wasn't enough, I guess, so now they can offer management of the device, remote wipe of company assets (email, calendar) and revocation of network credentials.
