More than 23,000 people have flooded the Moscone Center and the streets of San Francisco as VMworld 2015 has taken over the city. The first General Session of the week set the tone for an event focused on fast-paced innovation and transformational technology. Read on below for a recap of highlights from the General Session, the EUC Spotlight Session and a handful of other EUC sessions that grabbed our attention today.
General Session: One Cloud, Any Application, Any Device
VMware President and COO Carl Eschenbach kicked off Monday’s General Session by addressing the event theme this year, “Ready for Any.” With the power of VMware’s One Cloud, Any Application, Any Device architecture, IT professionals will be ready to meet any business challenge or opportunity that comes their way. Between customer use cases, new announcements and product demos, the key trends that stood out most throughout the session were the importance of applications and the transition to a unified hybrid cloud. Read more on VMware’s announcements from the General Session here:
- Introduction of VMware EVO SDDC and VMware Virtual SAN 6.1 to deploy and operate the software-defined data center at scale.
- New public cloud services and software-defined solutions for VMware’s unified hybrid cloud platform that will enable customers to build applications faster, improve IT security, rapidly recover from disasters and drive meaningful business value.
- Two new technology previews – VMware vSphere Integrated Containers and VMware Photon Platform – to empower enterprise IT operations teams to deliver containers in production on-premises and on VMware’s public cloud, VMware vCloud Air.
Spotlight Session: The Future of End-User Computing
VMware EUC leaders Erik Frieberg, Shankar Iyer, Noah Wasmer and Harry Labana took to the stage in the early afternoon to discuss three key topics that VMware EUC is currently focused on: Redefining desktop virtualization, addressing business challenges with EMM and securing and managing a variety of endpoints and applications. On the desktop side, Iyer spoke to the flexibility that VMware offers customers with Horizon 6, Horizon Air and Horizon FLEX. Through this family of desktop and application virtualization solutions, customers can deliver virtualized, cloud-based and containerized desktops and applications from a single platform to any device. Iyer also spoke briefly about Project Enzo, a next generation hybrid cloud architecture for the deployment and management of virtual desktops and applications.
Noah Wasmer then covered how traditional business challenges are being met with EMM. Balancing security and privacy, running and managing native applications and enabling multiple use case scenarios across a single environment are all issues that VMware and AirWatch continue to address for customers with our industry-leading EMM platform. Wasmer also cited major OS innovations, including Android M, Windows 10 and iOS 9, as key drivers of end user computing transformation. As OS vendors continue to put increased focus on the enterprise and work with leading EMM providers, VMware EUC will continue to develop and provide technologies that are consumer simple and enterprise secure.
Harry Labana wrapped up the session by focusing on endpoint and application management. Labana addressed how VMware is addressing application management disparity by providing a unified app delivery and management platform. Additionally, with the proliferation of connected devices in the Internet of Things, Labana addressed that security and ease of management for all types of endpoints is of paramount importance to the VMware EUC team.
Finding Value in EUC
Mark Margevicius, Director of Enterprise Solutions for EUC at VMware, and Ridwan Huq, Director of Product Marketing for EUC at VMware, gave attendees concrete examples of how to quantify costs and values associated with end-user computing in their session, “Show Me the Money! Finding Value in EUC – Why Identifying Benefits Beyond Cost Matter Most.” To build the business case for EUC, Margevicius and Huq suggested bringing concrete evidence of costs and value. Huq walked through typical cost elements associated with physical environments and compared them to the cost elements associated with VDI environments. Based on evidence from several customer deployments, Huq showed that customers who had deployed successful VDI environments in place of their physical environments saved an average of $500 per user per year.
After identifying the hard costs associated with desktop distribution and management, Margevicius and Huq gave examples of ways to find positive value within an EUC initiative: Ask for feedback from customers and end users through surveys, emails and lunch and learns; identify competitive differentiators like increased productivity and improved market perception; and demonstrate opportunities for cost savings, like business continuity and disaster recovery. If you’d like to read more about finding and demonstrating value in EUC, Brian Gammage, Chief Market Technologist for EUC at VMware, has a great blog post covering the topic on the EUC blog.
The Merge of Desktop and Mobile
AirWatch’s Paul Evans presented in the afternoon about how mobile and desktop are converging, and how this is bringing new opportunities and challenges for IT. While traditional management approaches aren’t able to unify disparate operating systems and device types, users in the mobile-cloud era demand greater flexibility. Evans highlighted how IT can manage laptops, tablets, smartphones and any variety of peripheral devices using Horizon and AirWatch, providing an integrated experience for users and IT that exists on top of a secure mobile-cloud architecture.
Project Enzo
Shikha Mittal and Ken Ringdahl of VMware closed out the day with a session dedicated to Project Enzo. Mittal and Ringdahl recapped Project Enzo’s features, highlights and architecture and then dove into a demo and an overview of the challenges that the technology will solve. The key takeaway from the session was that if your organization wants to the flexibility of managed services in the cloud but needs those services on-premises, then Project Enzo will be the right fit for you. They also announced that beta testing for Project Enzo is coming soon – if you’d like to be one of the first customers to test it out, visit www.vmwhorizonair.com/enzo and email [email protected].
Check back in tomorrow for highlights from the Tuesday General Session, where Sanjay Poonen will be talking about strategy and vision for EUC and business mobility moving forward.
