It’s VMworld time once again and we are excited to be back in San Francisco! As always, the #BestEUCTeam has lots of innovations, industry-firsts and partner announcements designed to take us all further into our combined journey to the Digital Workspace, delivering a consumer simple user experience with enterprise security. Just to let you know, now is a really good time to start a to-do list. Here’s the roundup.
Employee Experience
Driving an engaging Employee Experience is critical to ensuring employees are as productive as possible. At VMware, maximizing this Employee Experience is at the center of everything we do.
Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub was released last year to deliver an app store-like engaging experience delivering apps and new modern services, such as Notifications and People with just a tap. Also last year, VMware announced Workspace ONE Mobile Flows as part of Workspace ONE Boxer highly secure email app to enable one-click actionable workflows from popular business applications (i.e., Salesforce) without employees having to launch the apps. This year we have continued the innovations with new “Concierge Services” meant to provide employees guidance and assistance to keep them productive throughout their tenure:
• Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub is integrating an AI-powered Virtual Assistant, enabled with IBM Watson. Users can ask questions via text or voice with NLP (natural language processing) and receive guided assistance to answers on the organization’s Intranet or drive specific workflows like ordering new devices, registering new devices, configuring wi-fi, managing service desk tickets and more.
• The Virtual Assistant is part of a broader reinvention of Self Service in Intelligent Hub, which is enabling IT to provide employees with guided answers (including related documents links and knowledge base articles) to commonly asked organizational questions across IT, HR, etc., in order to lower help desk calls on common issues.
• On the flip side of the user-facing experience is what IT can do to ensure employees always have the best experience. New Workspace ONE “Digital Employee Experience Management” leverages UEM, Intelligence, and Aptelligent technologies to bring together hardware, OS and application performance data, enabling IT to proactively identify and automatically remediate potential performance issues before they impact the computing experience.
• VMware also introduces an industry-first cross platform remote control across iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, Windows 10 desktops and macOS (soon), enabling service desks and IT to instantly access, diagnose and fix end user issues in the field.
Additional Employee Experience innovations include:
• Workspace ONE Mobile Flows is now incorporated directly into Intelligent Hub and is being surfaced through actionable Notifications, keeping Hub as the go-to place for apps, people, content and now workflows across popular SaaS and behind the firewall applications.
• New Mobile Flows integration with Atlassian JIRA Service Desk enables Intelligent Hub users to instantly access and respond to all their service desk tickets without searching manually.
• Workspace ONE Boxer becomes the first highly secure (container) email app to achieve real-time iOS background sync even when the app is closed, so the user has immediate access to all email no matter how long the app has been closed.
• Workspace ONE Boxer also has become the first highly secure email app to attain NIAP Common Criteria certification for government and other high security organizations.
Modern Management
The embrace of Workspace ONE UEM by customers to manage PCs in addition to mobile devices has been tremendous. In the first six months of 2019, customers added over one million new Windows 10 PCs to their deployments! The value proposition of real-time, cloud-based modern management is how it revolutionizes legacy on-network workloads like onboarding, policies, patches, encryption management, compliance and even software distribution. New Workspace ONE modern management capabilities include:
• First UEM to enable full GPO migration to modern management with Workspace ONE Airlift, which accelerates modern management adoption and expands on AirLift’s capabilities to migrate collections, devices and applications from SCCM to Workspace ONE.
• First UEM to offer cross platform remote control across iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, Windows 10 desktops, and macOS (soon), enabling service desks and IT to instantly access, diagnose and fix end user issues in the field.
• First UEM to support Okta’s Universal Directory as the Primary IDP, enabling organizations to use Okta as their main user information store or to have a hybrid environment with Okta and other stores such as AD, AAD or LDAP.
• New Workspace ONE Enterprise App Repository provides a marketplace of hundreds of pre-packaged and tested commonly used Win32 applications that you can import to alleviate time commonly spent testing new app versions and OSs in use.
• Workspace ONE will deliver Day One support for iOS 13 devices including beta of new User Enrollment, which will enable apps and services on BYO devices without full device management. This will give IT a new option in deploying BYO with security and privacy.
• Modern Update Management framework for Apple platforms with cloud-based controls for major and minor updates to reduce update disruption and keep your iPhones, iPads and Macs always up-to-date.
• Further Apple integrations extending macOS management capabilities with powerful scripting and sequencing, FileVault encryption lifecycle management and System Integrity Protection compliance checks.
• Automated migration of legacy Android management to modern Android Enterprise Management.
• Full certificate lifecycle management for Chrome OS devices and ability to lock down the device from the UEM console.
In addition to these Modern Management updates, VMware EUC has expanded its Workspace ONE support for Dell Technologies Unified Workspace with additional support for the new Dell Chromebook Enterprise, SafeBIOS integrations for BIOS health monitoring and remediation and persistence of Workspace ONE agent on the device to protect customers when a device is lost or stolen.
Multi-Cloud Virtual Desktops
The value proposition for cloud-based desktops continues to build just as the value and adoption rates of SaaS applications continue to rise. We have all worked out that options, flexibility and agility are important when it comes to the cloud along with the constant of a great user experience, both for the end user and for IT. VMware Horizon continues to lead the desktop side of the digital workspace journey delivering desktops with the benefits of SaaS apps:
• New VMware Horizon image, app, and lifecycle services across a single Horizon control plane delivering improved administration, app deployment and performance monitoring for desktops and apps across multiple clouds.
• Complete desktop hybridity through automated session brokering across multi-site and multi-cloud environments delivering the user to the most efficient or most desired location.
• Announcement of Horizon Cloud (managed Horizon service) for Windows Virtual Desktops (WVD) to be available in tech preview* by the end of calendar 2019.
• VMware announced plans to extend our existing support of Horizon 7 on VMC on AWS to a full DaaS offering on AWS.
• Bringing together Horizon with the recently acquired Avi Networks to improve load balancing services for more secure desktop and application access.
• New VMware Subscription Upgrade Program for Horizon that enables Horizon 7 customers to upgrade existing perpetual licenses to Horizon Universal License at a price reflecting the additional value, allowing them to deploy anywhere – on-premises or in the cloud.
• Further simplifications to desktop and app administration.
Security
VMware continues to embrace the shift to Zero Trust security models, innovating within our own solutions and with partners to deliver an intelligent approach to security:
• Workspace ONE Intelligence delivers new Risk Analytics that deliver user and device risk scores with continuous verification should device, OS, app, or user attributes change even after authentication.
• Risk score integration with Workspace ONE Access to inform the authentication process and prompt for step-up authentication, if required.
• New Trust Network integrations are GA for Lookout, Carbon Black and Netskope to incorporate third party risk information into Workspace ONE Intelligence.
Remember to sign up now for the EUC keynote: Becoming a Champion of Digital Employee Experience presented by Shankar Iyer, SVP, GM End User Computing and Shawn Bass, VP, CTO End User Computing. Last year we very quickly maxed out the attendance in the room, so save your spot by registering.
We are excited to share more details about everything we are doing in EUC and looking forward to hanging out with you for some good VMworld fun in the long hot summer nights of San Francisco. Sign up for more EUC sessions here.
* There is no commitment or obligation that tech preview features will become generally available.
