We are trying to supply one of our clients with an ipa to deploy on their AirWatch. There is a lot of conflicting information on what is the best way to do that, but they all seem to agree on the fact that it needs to be signed with the certificate and private keys of some account. However, the client seems to be managing their apple enterprise account through AirWatch. Does this mean that we could supply them with an unsigned ipa file and let AirWatch do its thing?
I have been scouring the internet for a while for this information and the closest ones are similar to Renew iOS Development and APNs Production for Corporate Apps [AirWatch] which is not what i was looking for
No - AirWatch does not re-sign anything IPA-wise. It can interrogate your IPA to make sure you're not trying to accidentally update App A's IPA with the IPA for App B but that's about it.
The link you provided has nothing to do with re-signing applications within AirWatch as much as it is the general practice for renewing your Enterprise Apple Developer Cert and Provisioning Profiles.
If you try to deploy an unsigned IPA to a device not in your Developer Portal you will likely run into an issue where the app will begin installation then throw an error that it cannot be installed.
Regarding what your client is doing there may be some confusion as AirWatch does not directly tie back to the Apple Developer Portal except for the MDM APNs cert which is unrelated to IPAs.