VMworld 2015 is officially underway, and the EUC team is already off to a great start. While the bulk of sessions start tomorrow, today’s EUC sessions had strong turnouts and set the groundwork for a week focused on the future of the mobile cloud era. This morning, Noah Wasmer presented on VMware’s vision for business mobility, touching on content management, Apple in the enterprise and the growing mobile ecosystem. Read a great recap of his session from Jack Madden here.
Later in the day, Shawn Bass spoke to a packed room on “The Future of End User Computing.” Shawn gave a high-level overview of the VMware EUC vision for the next three years, including a strong focus on Windows management in the enterprise, enterprise mobility, identity management, security and data. Here are some of the key takeaways from his session:
Windows 10 in the Enterprise
- Business case: 14 million devices were using Windows 10 within the first 24 hours of availability, making it the fastest adopted version of Windows ever.
- VMware EUC POV: Windows 10 has been so successful for a few key reasons: it’s free to consumers, so there’s little barrier to adoption; because of its similar resource consumption to Windows 7 and Windows 8, not many people or IT departments had to do a hardware refresh to upgrade; the updated user experience was not very disruptive; and the ease of upgrading and managing allowed IT to embrace the new OS.
- Key Takeaway: Thanks to Windows’ new heightened focus on the enterprise and user experience, we believe that “Windows 10 will be a catalyst for End User Computing change.”
Enterprise Mobility Trends
- Business case: Today there are approximately 2.5-3 billion smartphones, over 1 billion tablets and approximately 1.5-2 billion PC’s. The Internet of Things is expected to reach approximately 20-25 billion connected devices by 2020.
- VMware EUC POV: Mobility trends like BYOD, containerization and endpoint management are still on the rise, thanks to consumer demand and IT’s need for increased security.
- Key Takeaway: Device proliferation is not slowing down, and the concept of separating work and personal information on devices is becoming increasingly important to both end users and IT. AirWatch EMM helps enterprises address these concerns by providing flexible deployment options and user-based policies.
Identity and Security
- Business case: Users currently have too many account logins and passwords – on average, people have 25-35 accounts that they use regularly, but their total count can easily top 100. For these accounts, passwords are frequently reused, resulting in massive security gaps that could cause a chain reaction of compromised corporate data.
- VMware EUC POV: Identity management, integrated with security technologies like biometric authentication, two-factor authentication and single sign-on, gives consumers easier access to resources while maintaining the highest levels of security for IT. For example, by combining AirWatch per-app VPN capabilities with NSX microsegmentation, IT can reduce the chances of mobile malware damage in the data center.
- Key takeaway: VMware continues to integrate across platforms, including AirWatch, Horizon, NSX and VMware Identity Manager, to ensure that access to corporate resources is consumer-simple and enterprise secure.
Data and the Growing Importance of Search
- Business case: According to recent research by IBM, 90% of global data was created in the last two years. Every day, we’re creating more and more data, but enterprise users continue to store it across multiple repositories – the average employee uses at least 6-12 different tools to store and search for reliable data (e.g. corporate intranet, corporate cloud storage accounts, personal cloud storage accounts, etc.).
- VMware EUC POV: IT needs to be able to securely manage and store corporate content while providing end users with one central location to access these resources. By combining content management with knowledge management and enterprise social networking, VMware EUC will help IT to empower its employees in finding and utilizing the resources they need at the click of a button.
- Key Takeaway: Content is king. VMware continues to focus on collaboration and content management within the enterprise so that employees can access the resources they need from any device at any time, without IT having to sacrifice security.
Tomorrow will be a jam-packed day filled with more great sessions, Hands-On Labs, partner solution demos and more. If you’re at VMworld and still building out your schedule, make sure to add these top AirWatch sessions and the top 10 EUC sessions, hand-picked by Shawn Bass, to your schedule. If you weren’t able to make it out to San Francisco this year, we’ll be tweeting live updates from all of our EUC Twitter handles (@AirWatch, @VMwareHorizon, @Socialcast) and will be giving daily EUC-focused recaps on the AirWatch and EUC Blogs so you can follow along without missing any of the action.
