VMware is giving a major shot in the arm to its mobile strategy by buying AirWatch, one of the leaders in the enterprise mobile device management space.

The Palo Alto, California-based giant announced the US$1.54bn acquisition Thursday, planning to fold it under its End-User Computing Group. However, AirWatch staff will continue to report to its founder and CEO John Marshall, and the company's Atlanta, Georgia, headquarters will be expanded.

AirWatch has been around for about 12 years and last year raised $200m in its first round of institutional funding. Other major players in its space are MobileIron, Good Technology, Apperian and Citrix, according to GigaOM research.

Citrix is a major VMware competitor in the virtual-desktop infrastructure market, and a smaller competitor in the server-virtualization space.

AirWatch offers enterprise solutions for mobile device management, mobile application management and mobile content management.

Mobile is exploding in the enterprise. According to Gartner, it is becoming a “requirement for everything.” The market research firm forecasted last April that mobile phones would overtake PCs as the most common device worldwide by the end of 2013.

In a blog post, Sanjay Poonen, executive VP and general manager of end-user computing at VMware, wrote that everyone's lives had been transformed by mobile computing, “from the top floor to the shop floor.

“The world needs a robust enterprise mobility platform for the post-PC world of heterogeneous devices – be it iOS, Android or Windows – and now that is VMware,” he wrote.

One example of this transformation in the enterprise world Customer Relationship Management (CRM), one of the most widely used types of enterprise software. Gartner expects the number of mobile CRM applications in app stores to go from 200 in 2012 to more than 1,200 this year.

“VMware’s vision for end-user computing has been to create a secure virtual workspace that allows end-users to work at the speed of life – so that as they move from desktop, to laptop, to tablet, to phone, to car – their apps, their content, their devices come to life seamlessly – anywhere, anyplace, anytime,” Poonen wrote.