How David's Bridal Uses Mobile Device Management

David's Bridal has more than 60 years of experience dressing women of all ages for life's special occasions. Nearly 60% of all United States (U.S.) brides choose to shop at one of more than 300 David's Bridal stores in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico. The corporate headquarters is located in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania.

Prior to 2010, David's Bridal supported a fairly locked-down environment where corporate data could only be accessed via company owned desktops, laptops, Blackberry smartphones and certified NCR hardware for retail stores. Essentially, if an employee didn't have one of these standard devices, they were not granted access. "The landscape began to change rapidly, and in 2010 we knew we needed to become more flexible and find a way to be more hardware agnostic," said Caryn Furtaw, CIO, David's Bridal. Numerous factors impacted this shift, including an increasing demand for email access via personal iPhones and iPads, the introduction of an iPod touch application for the chain that needed remote management, as well as Furtaw's belief that moving toward a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) model might be a path worth exploring in the future. Success hinged on finding the most flexible and scalable mobile device management (MDM) solution.

"We ultimately selected AirWatch as our MDM solution for several reasons," said Scott Strahler, director of Technical Services at David's Bridal. "We wanted a solid company with a history of successful deployments and results. It is the only MDM solution with truly flexible deployment options and its SaaS offering enabled us to get up and running quickly. In addition, the ability to centrally manage all mobile devices in a single console and monitor activity in real time was very important."