I am excited to join all of you for another edition of VMworld!
Today, I will share all of the announcements that Shankar Iyer, SVP and General Manager for EUC, and I made this morning in our Digital Workspace Showcase Keynote. We had a lot of news to cover in a short amount of time, but rest assured that we have plenty of breakout sessions, blog posts and demos detailing all our announcements in depth.
More importantly, I would like to say how grateful all of us at VMware are for the opportunity to help so many of our customers through the changing work environment this year. We have learned many lessons in the process, and we have seen again and again the value of a flexible, modern digital workspace.
Lessons learned about the role of a digital workspace platform
Before we get to the announcements, let’s look at what we have learned this year.
When customers had to rapidly alter their environments, end-user computing professionals jumped into action. Our customers scaled up VDI deployments in the cloud and on premises to enable remote work. They delivered access to the apps and devices that frontline workers needed to keep us safe. With modern management, they managed devices remotely, and even onboarded new employees. And many organizations brought far more BYO devices into their environment than ever before. We can all be proud of the role that EUC professionals played in keeping businesses, schools and all sorts of critical services running.
During these times, we’ve learned a lot about remote work. It has its challenges, but we’ve also seen the value of flexible work styles and the benefits of being able to hire from anywhere. We wanted to see the bigger picture, so today in the keynote, Shankar shared some stats from a recent study commissioned by VMware and Dell. Here are some of the highlights:
• 42% of employees said that since the wave of remote work began, they think of the ability to work remotely as a pre-requisite for their job—it’s not just a perk. Only 30% said that remote work was a prerequisite prior to these times.
• 75% of employees said that now, employees outside of corporate headquarters feel more empowered to make decisions.
• 90% of those we surveyed agreed that it is the responsibility of the employer to ensure that employees have appropriate access to digital tools to enable remote work.
Source: “The New Remote Work Era: Trends in the Distributed Workforce.” Vanson Bourne, June–July 2020. N=5700.
We can see that employee expectations are changing, and that IT will have to redesign experiences to keep up. Now, organizations are moving from merely supporting remote users, to becoming an anywhere organization with a distributed workforce. In other words, remote work isn’t just an afterthought anymore.
All of this points to the need for a comprehensive and modern approach to end-user computing. The problem is that, in many cases today, organizations are stuck dealing with disconnected silos for different types of devices, VDI, identity, security and all the other aspects of EUC. IT has to stitch these disparate solutions together, which makes it harder to respond quickly to changes, and makes for a poor employee experience.
As you know, this is what has driven our work on the VMware Workspace ONE platform. Workspace ONE provides a complete set of capabilities to allow customers to achieve their goals for employee engagement, IT modernization and Zero Trust security. Let’s take a closer look at each one of these areas.
Employee engagement
At VMware, we believe that employee engagement is correlated with business success. Furthermore, you’ve heard us talk about the importance of the physical, cultural and technological aspects of employee experience, which all have a profound effect on engagement. Now, when the digital workspace is often the only way that employees interact with their organization, the experience that it provides is all that much more important.
With VMware Workspace ONE, many of our employee engagement features center around Intelligent Hub, our digital workspace application. This is not only where employees can get single sign on access to all of their applications—including native, web and virtual apps and desktops—but where they can find so much more, including micro apps for quick tasks, communications from IT and HR, remote support, company directories and intranet access.
Companies want to provide this great experience throughout the entire employee lifecycle. On that note, today we’re excited to announce the general availability of the Day 0 onboarding experience for new employees. With so many new workers joining their company entirely virtually, making this critical milestone seamless and friendly is more important now than ever before.
With the Day 0 onboarding experience, newly hired employees can get access to Intelligent Hub from the time they accept their offer, before their first day of work. Companies can use this to offer access to HR apps, onboarding workflows, directories, and other resources. Then, on their first day, employees will see this expand into their full set of resources.
Support for BYOD is another critical need, not only for employee engagement, but as we saw earlier this year, also for business continuity. VMware has long been a leader in BYOD, with support for more flexible, more secure, and more privacy-centric approaches across the Workspace ONE platform.
Today, we are announcing another key capability for BYOD, in the form of new time-based access controls for Workspace ONE, coming soon. Customers will be able to enable employees with access to their resources only during their assigned shifts, and maintain compliance in regions that have regulations covering working hours.
Lastly, when companies shifted to remote work this year, some of them faced challenges getting all of the right endpoints they needed. Some turned to BYOD laptops to help with business continuity. Others had enough corporate laptops, but still had problems with management and visibility when these devices went remote.
To help in both of these situations, we are excited to announce support for the full native Intelligent Hub experience on BYO or third-party managed Windows 10 devices, available now. This means that no matter what, customers will be able to deliver all of the benefits of Intelligent Hub, including SSO, self service requests, per-app Tunnel for corporate intranet apps, remote support with Assist, and our Digital Employee Experience Management, built on top of Workspace ONE Intelligence.
IT Modernization
Having the most modern and flexible unified endpoint management and desktop virtualization platform can help our customers in many ways.
In the keynote this morning, I shared that during the first 6 weeks of the transition to remote work, the total number of cloud-deployed desktops with VMware Horizon grew 82%. (March 13 to April 24, 2020. Internal VMware data.) Those of us who have been in the desktop virtualization space for a long time know that this is absolutely incredible. In fact, during this period, one of our customers deployed capacity for 38,000 desktops in 5 days using Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure, in order to enable their entire workforce to work from home.
As you know, we announced Horizon 8 in August (now generally available), and before that, an update of Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure, our true desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) offering, in July. In addition, there’s plenty more to talk about across the Horizon portfolio, as we continue to deliver on our vision for the Horizon Control Plane.
The Horizon Control Plane offers customers a broad set of management services—Universal Broker, Multi-Cloud Assignments, Image Management, App Management, Monitoring, Help Desk and more—which can be used across both cloud and on-premises deployments. With updates including the recent availability of App Volumes on Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure, as well as upcoming support for image management, the Horizon family provides customers a modern approach for secure delivery of desktops and apps across the hybrid cloud.
In Workspace ONE UEM, this morning we shared that from June 2019 to June 2020, our Windows 10 Modern Management deployments more than doubled. And recently, we received the highest score (3.94/5) in the Enterprise PC Management use case in the Gartner 2020 Critical Capabilities for Unified Endpoint Management Tools report. We now have customers with individual deployments of over 100,000 fully modern managed Windows 10 devices, in industries including manufacturing, communications, technology, and services. You can read more in tomorrow’s blog post covering Windows 10, but the key fact is that truly, we have proven the value of cloud-based modern management at scale.
Today, we are also excited to announce that support for factory provisioning is now available with HP and Lenovo, building on our previous support for Dell. With remote employees, this time-saving capability has become all that much more important.
In macOS, we’ve continued to invest and have added support for scripting, sensors, and automation, as well as resources for IT professionals, like training, badging, and communities. For Linux, today we are announcing the beta of a broad set of additional management capabilities that are architecture and build agnostic, which will enable all sorts of use cases like managing developer laptops. And finally, all of this is on top of our usual stream of updates for iOS, Android, and other devices. Workspace ONE UEM truly delivers on the promise of unified endpoint management, with great support for all platforms.
We know that supporting all these devices is only part of the task. With the proliferation of devices and applications, admins have a huge task in front of them as they look to deliver a seamless employee experience across any device, app, and location. To that end, last year, we announced Digital Employee Experience Management (DEEM), a broad set of monitoring, analytics, and automation capabilities built on top of Workspace ONE Intelligence. We have delivered improved visibility into Windows 10, iOS, and Android health and app performance to help you proactively identify issues, troubleshoot, and remediate with automation. In a short time, we will extend these capabilities to macOS. Today at VMworld, we announced the tech preview of our employee experience score. Soon, we will also have more incident reporting and root cause analysis (RCA) flows news to share with you.
This year, we are continuing our efforts by announcing another new innovation for IT administrators, Freestyle Orchestrator. This is a low-code, canvas UI-based IT orchestration platform built into the Workspace ONE UEM console, and it gives admins the power to create and deploy complex workflows with flexibility and speed. I highly encourage you to watch the demo that we featured in the keynote, as we believe that this is the future of modern enterprise IT. Freestyle Orchestrator will be coming soon as a Tech Preview, with workflows for Windows 10 and macOS. Later, it will expand across all platforms and integrate into the full Workspace ONE ecosystem, as well as third-party systems.
Zero Trust Security
Now, let’s turn to security. Our customers have used VMware Horizon and Workspace ONE UEM as part of their strategy for years, but we have also made many investments in Workspace ONE Access, Intelligence, Trust Network and Tunnel. And as we announced last year, we have brought Workspace ONE and VMware Carbon Black together in our Workspace Security solutions.
This is meaningful for customers like Zoom, who have been using Workspace ONE to enable compliant devices to access resources, and are now planning to integrate Carbon Black with their deployment.
Now, I am pleased to share that we have additional Workspace Security offerings to share. Using Workspace Security VDI, customers will be able to combine VMware Horizon and VMware Carbon Black Cloud, reducing management overhead. Support for persistent desktops is available now, and support for Instant Clones is coming soon.
Our other new offering is Workspace Security Remote, which includes capabilities that customers need to manage and provide support for remote Windows 10 and macOS laptops. Workspace Security Remote includes VMware Workspace ONE, Workspace ONE Assist, and Carbon Black Cloud, and is available now.
Looking at new developments within the Workspace ONE platform, we are taking our vulnerability management features for Windows 10, and expanding them into a complete solution for cross-platform vulnerability management. This will include dashboards, reporting and automation features, and is coming soon with support for Windows 10 and macOS. We’re also working on support for mobile devices. This will be a valuable tool for IT teams to track patching goals and collaborate with SecOps teams.
Of course, with organizations becoming so much more distributed this year, the need for Zero Trust has continued to become more urgent.
Authentication is a cornerstone of Zero Trust, and as we shared earlier this year, we are adding modern multi-factor functionality directly into the Intelligent Hub app; this is now in Tech Preview. For any organizations that still haven’t adopted multi-factor authentication, this will be the easiest way to get started. Many other customers want to do even more with authentication, so today we are sharing that we will soon provide support for FIDO2 and Web Authentication. This means customers will be able to easily use the latest USB, Bluetooth and NFC security keys with Workspace ONE Access.
Zero Trust also calls for continuous risk evaluation and trust verification. Along these lines, last year we announced Risk Analytics, which can calculate user and device risk scores based on signals from the Workspace ONE platform. Now, we’re continuing along this path with dynamic Login Risk assessment, which will take in additional context around the point of authentication. This is coming soon.
Workspace ONE Access is our foundation for enforcing conditional access policies when users authenticate. Building on this further, today we are announcing the ability to use our Workspace One Tunnel app to continuously evaluate activity after users are authenticated, coming soon. Tunnel will be able to consume signals from the Workspace ONE platform and then take enforcement actions such as interrupting app sessions or requiring identity validation.
Overall, we’re excited to continue to grow and expand our Zero Trust capabilities. One of our strengths at VMware is our ability create solutions that leverage our entire security portfolio, beyond just EUC. In June, VMware announced Secure Access, which combines our Unified Access Gateway with VMware SD-WAN by VeloCloud.
This new Secure Access offering is a critical component of the VMware Secure Access Service Edge Platform, which was featured in today’s Intrinsic Security keynote, the VeloCloud blog, and in our Future Ready Workforce press release.
The VMware Secure Access Service Edge Platform (or SASE Platform) converges cloud networking and cloud security services to deliver flexibility, agility and scalability for enterprises of all sizes. It is a cloud-first offering that delivers application quality assurance, intrinsic security and operational simplicity, and is ideal for organizations that are supporting a work from anywhere workforce. Workspace ONE is a key component of VMware’s SASE offering, and lends a depth and breadth of capabilities for a truly end-to-end Zero Trust solution.
Final thoughts
While I miss seeing everybody in person for VMworld, the online format means that many more people will be able to attend than ever before. And as you can see, our pace of innovation continues to accelerate, so we have a lot of great content to share this week. Please check out our content catalog, demo lab and VMworld.com for more, and watch out for additional blog posts going deeper on today’s announcements throughout the week.
I’d like to thank all of you for joining us at VMworld this year. Thank you for your continued support, and thank you for being part of the incredible EUC community. I hope you enjoy the rest of VMworld!
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Gartner, Critical Capabilities for Unified Endpoint Management Tools, Chris Silva, Rob Smith, Rich Doheny, Manjunath Bhat, Dan Wilson August 18, 2020. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
