Greetings! And hope all of you are enjoying the first ever virtual VMworld this year. Our End-User Computing (EUC) Showcase Keynote this morning was led by Shankar Iyer (EUC GM) and Shawn Bass (EUC CTO) and was a chockfull of announcements in 30 minutes or less. This blog distills some of the key takeaways around VMware Workspace ONE Unified Endpoint Management (UEM).
This past year has been an incredible period of innovations for Workspace ONE UEM. And to top it off, VMware was named a LEADER in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) for the THIRD year in a row. VMware also scored HIGHEST in THREE out of four use cases in the Gartner Critical Capabilities for UEM Tools, including enterprise PC management, role-based device management and compliance-driven management use cases.
As customers wrestled through new workstyles, use cases and platform choice requirements, VMware has been particularly committed to deliver a Modern IT platform that is not only Ready for IT, but also Built for the User! And it was a great to see customers adopt Workspace ONE UEM and related IT modernization services for remote support, experience analytics and automation quickly and at scale across both desktop and mobile platforms. Let’s look at what we are adding to Workspace ONE UEM to help your journey to an anywhere workforce:
Cloud-native modern management that scales for your distributed workforce demands
Cloud-native modern management of the Windows 10 has its merits in optimizing costs and simplifying IT operations, especially when compared to traditional on-premises or hybrid PC lifecycle management. And now more than ever, customers also see immediate benefits of this approach in being able to deploy, manage and secure PCs anywhere – including at homes – without network or domain dependencies. So, not surprising that our Windows 10 Modern Management deployments more than doubled last year. As we saw in the keynote about Verizon switching to Windows 10 modern management with Workspace ONE UEM, we now have customers with individual deployments of over 100,000 fully modern managed Windows 10 devices and across various industries.
A first step towards a modern management of PCs is to ensure that the employee has an appropriate device to work. To this effect, VMware had previously worked with Dell to support a drop ship provisioning experience for Windows PCs. Today, we are excited to announce that VMware has now partnered with Lenovo and HP to make this experience broadly available across each of the top 3 PC manufacturers. As part of this service and powered by Workspace ONE UEM, customers can work directly with the OEM to ship ready-to-work PCs straight from the factory to the employee’s desk and enable productivity on first boot. The PC is pre-configured with required company policies to secure the OS from the get-go. A core set of apps are pre-loaded in the factory, so employees don’t spend countless hours waiting on apps to download, especially on home networks. This experience has found a new meaning during the pandemic as both employee and IT teams are often no longer in company premises and traditional OS deployment approaches – such as imaging – can become high touch.
The next step is to enable employee access to apps they need most on their PCs. Here, we are excited to bring the full native Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub experience on Windows 10 – whether these PCs are Workspace ONE UEM managed, BYO or third-party managed. This will enable employees with the most powerful digital workspace experience even on their Windows PC: including self-service access to all apps – SaaS, native, store, virtual – at one place, one-touch SSO, per-app Tunnel for secure access to behind the firewall corporate apps, corporate communications, approval workflows, smart assistant, remote support and even proactive experience management powered by Workspace ONE Intelligence.
We are also excited to bring forward a new Enterprise App Repository within Workspace ONE UEM to speed delivery of frequently used Windows apps. Let’s face it, Windows apps are tough! Two-thirds of the IT effort is spent simply getting these apps ready for the user, i.e., packaging and testing. The rest in keeping these apps up-to-date, i.e., patched. Enterprise App Repository serves as a one-stop-shop for IT teams to source 100s of commonly used, pre-packaged apps that they can instantly deploy to employees’ Intelligent Hub catalog. The apps are pre-tested across the latest OS builds and kept up-to-date for protection against potential vulnerabilities. As companies react quickly to keep employees productive, Enterprise App Repository will ensure IT spends less time packaging, testing and updating apps and more time delivering the business-critical support and services that users need now!
Enterprise ready platform that lets employees work on any device – fast!
Workspace ONE UEM has always been about choice – any device, any app and any use case! To that end, we continue in building an enterprise-grade platform that offers the most breadth across OS platforms supported and most depth in management.
This year, we took long strides to bolster Workspace ONE UEM support for macOS with exciting new features, a new training program and badging for Mac admins and a completely redesigned community engagement platform. We have significantly enhanced the zero-touch enrollment workflows by providing rich real-time feedback (e.g. configuration and app install status) to the end-user while the device is being setup, ensuring a seamless and transparent onboarding experience. Admins now have a completely refreshed experience to create, deploy and manage complex macOS scripts and sensors. Intelligent Hub now allows users to run quick scripts (e.g. printer refresh) right from the catalog for self-service troubleshooting without having to call Helpdesk. And of course, we continue to deliver same day support for many of the enterprise features that are part of macOS Big Sur and iOS 14.
On Android, we continue to push the envelope with enhanced support for Launcher, shared device or CICO support, OEM Config and Feedback Channel, closed network deployments and more. This last year, we have seen Android Enterprise (AE) enrollments in Workspace ONE UEM more than double. And we continue to drive adoption by making AE the default management approach for net new Android devices and automating AE migration – including new capabilities for Zebra AE migration without having to factory reset devices.
Switching gears to Linux, we announced the beta for a broad set of management capabilities – including enrolling the device, configuring work profiles (e.g. Wi-Fi, credentials, certificates, etc.), building custom payloads utilizing Puppet Manifests, deploying apps and more! We see the initial use case for Linux management will be for x86-based developer laptops and ARM-based devices such as Raspberry Pi. By remaining agnostic to the distributions – whether Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Linux Mint, Raspbian, RHEL, SUSE, TENS and more – customers will be able to leverage Workspace ONE UEM for plenty of future use cases outside of just laptops. For example: point of sale systems, in-flight computers, retail inventory robots, IoT gateways, printers and more.
Modern IT orchestration services that transform your team!
There is no doubt that the current climate has changed the remote working landscape; and it will continue to have a significant impact into the future. In fact, as per a recent VMware and Dell Technologies commissioned study, as many as 57% of the participant organizations said that they expect more than half of their workforce to work remote in the next 12 months. Not surprisingly, there has been a marked increase in time spent on IT tickets with many employees continuing to work remotely. Reducing this overhead requires:
1. a cross-platform remote support technology that helps improve average handle time (AHT) and first call resolution (FCR) rate when responding to employee support tickets; and
2. an end-user experience analytics technology that proactively surfaces workspace related issues and remediates them before they even become a support escalation.
On #1, we are excited to announce expanded platform support in Workspace ONE Assist – an integrated remote support tool within the Workspace ONE platform that already works across mobile, Windows 10, macOS and rugged operating systems. Assist will now be able to support BYO/unmanaged as well as unattended Windows 10 PCs; and adds new features for collaboration/sharing of support sessions. Further, Assist will also be available as a beta for Linux platform later this year with support for command line and file manager controls.
On #2, building upon our Digital Employee Experience Management (or DEEM) announcement from last year, we are excited to preview employee experience score that consolidates performance and engagement metrics across users, devices (mobile and desktop) and apps (beyond just Office 365). We have also added a broad set of monitoring, analytics and automation capabilities – including new dashboards that surface employee experience trends over time, device health, start and shutdown performance, apps with high crash rate and many more. Admins can view detailed events leading to performance issues, drill down into various parameters for incident reporting and root cause analysis, and create remediation actions that will improve employee experience.
One more thing…
Yes, there’s more. In fact, something that we are extremely excited about!
Clearly, the technology considerations for our customers are growing more complex and diverse every day. And now, more than ever, our customers are looking for simplified engagement methods for these powerful technologies. They are looking for automation and orchestration across various IT investments to help them create new business opportunities. They are looking beyond modern management and UEM to modernize their entire IT landscape.
To help our customers along this journey, we are excited to introduce Workspace ONE Freestyle Orchestrator – an entirely new way to interact with the IT ecosystem. It is a completely redesigned low-code IT orchestration tool for the modern admin; and an entirely new way to interact within UEM. Freestyle Orchestratrator will allow admins to quickly publish workflows by pulling in resources like apps, profiles, scripts, policies and conditions – all from one place – through a new drag and drop canvas UI. This brings forward limitless possibilities, whether looking to streamline a device onboarding workflow that sequentially pulls in expected configurations, apps and behaviors; automate desired state management across these devices; take a unified app management approach for an app entitlement across multiple platforms – mobile, desktop, virtual, web; automate license usage; and many more.
Freestyle Orchestrator is going into Tech Preview starting in UEM with support available for Windows 10 and macOS, with mobile device and Linux support coming soon. Debuting within UEM, it will soon integrate into the full Workspace ONE ecosystem, as well as 3rd party systems. We can’t wait to see this become the new normal for a modernized IT!
To learn more about all of the Digital Workspace news at VMworld 2020, head over to our keynote recap blog: VMworld 2020: All of our EUC announcements, themes, and everything else you need to know.
