We are thrilled to announce today a new strategic partnership between VMware and BetterCloud, the industry leader in the SaaS Management Platform (SMP) market. VMware is introducing a new offering called VMware SaaS App Management by BetterCloud.
This new solution extends the capabilities of the VMware Workspace ONE platform by providing targeted management and security for SaaS applications. Beginning today, VMware customers can add VMware SaaS App Management by BetterCloud as an add-on to Workspace ONE and Horizon.
VMware SaaS App Management is part of the VMware Anywhere Workspace solution, helping customers manage employee experience, embrace Zero Trust security and automate the workspace, via a combination of end-user computing, secure access service edge and endpoint protection technologies.
Shankar Iyer, SVP and GM of End-User Computing at VMware, and David Politis, CEO of BetterCloud, announced this exciting partnership today at VMworld 2021.
What is a SaaS Management Platform?
SaaS management platforms represent the next logical step for customers in their digital workspace journey.
The last decade has seen the explosion of diverse endpoint devices and SaaS apps in the enterprise. Unified endpoint management has emerged and matured to address the needs of diverse endpoints. And identity management platforms are solving for authentication, SSO and user provisioning in SaaS apps.
However, the majority of enterprise SaaS applications have a range of proprietary administration settings relating to management, security and user experience, which cannot be managed by any standard protocol or schema. Instead, these settings must be managed via proprietary APIs. Managing settings manually, or integrating with APIs for a growing number of SaaS applications, is a time-consuming and potentially error-prone task, creating significant pain points for enterprise IT.
SaaS Management Platforms (SMPs), used for the practice of SaaS Operations Management (SaaSOps), serve this need for integrating, aggregating and normalizing the APIs in disparate SaaS applications. SMPs can surface visibility and control for SaaS applications in a centralized, unified control plane, and present it to enterprise IT. With this platform, IT can discover, manage and better secure SaaS applications, and integrate SaaSOps into their broader end-user computing strategy.
Why VMware chose BetterCloud
Over the past 10 years, BetterCloud has pioneered the SaaSOps movement, practice and category. BetterCloud has thousands of customers across the globe with 8.5 million SaaS users actively being managed by its platform every day. BetterCloud now supports 70 out-of-the-box SaaS integrations, and provides an extensive API for custom integrations.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift to remote work, and SaaSOps became more relevant than ever. We found the topic of SaaSOps, and the capabilities that BetterCloud offers, became top of mind for many IT leaders.
When we look at the needs of our customers, it is clear that organizations are massively investing in SaaS. However, those investments are wastefully underperforming if users can’t be up and running with their SaaS apps on Day 1. Today, IT can’t effectively manage the growing complexity and variety of SaaS app policies, as data leakage and overall SaaS app posture and configuration have become massive challenges.
To address these problems, VMware extensively evaluated the SaaS Management Platforms market to offer a holistic app management platform that goes beyond desktop and mobile apps to extend user lifecycle management and data security to SaaS applications.
VMware and BetterCloud share a unique philosophy and vision that organizations can elevate both employee experience and security simultaneously with automation. And indeed, we have heard from technology decision makers that these topics – security, employee experience and automation – are their top concerns.
Let’s look at how BetterCloud – and now VMware SaaS App Management by BetterCloud – address these concerns.
Security
IT teams seek to establish policies protecting corporate assets within their SaaS estate, avoid accidental data breaches and mitigate insider threats. They want to achieve simpler, faster and smarter security with automated remediation workflows. For a VMware customer, this means combining endpoint security, endpoint management and network edge security with SaaS application security in a holistic solution.
BetterCloud and VMware SaaS App Management by BetterCloud empower IT to assign the right level of access to avoid accidental data breaches and protect against insider threats. It further mitigates security risks by setting up guardrails for user activity and delivers least privilege access to keep corporate assets secure.
Both VMware and BetterCloud believe it is critical to have flexibility and precision when securing users’ applications and their data anywhere, and strike the right balance for an organization’s unique business needs—you no longer have to sacrifice security or employee productivity. As an add-on to VMware Workspace ONE portfolio, BetterCloud puts user experiences at the forefront while enabling stronger security for today’s distributed workforce.
Employee Experience
An SMP improves employee experience by proactively ensuring employees have access to all SaaS apps and resources required to perform their job. This means first obtaining full visibility of all apps used across an organization, then identifying app redundancy, understanding license utilization and taking corrective actions to right size SaaS spend. It also means being able to automatically fulfill self-service requests from employees asking not only to access, but also completely configure their desired SaaS app to become instantly productive.
This is about removing everyday friction for employee productivity, and reaping the benefits of enabling employees to work smarter and better in today’s digital workplaces.
Zero Touch Automation
The BetterCloud SMP enables IT to automate manual, day-to-day SaaS app admin tasks such as onboarding, offboarding, configuration changes and more. With a fully customizable, zero-code workflow platform built with patented operational intelligence, 70 out-of-the-box SaaS integrations and 1,000+ included SaaS admin actions, BetterCloud speeds IT modernization efforts by fully automating processes with zero touch.
For organizations, this ultimately increases IT responsiveness and efficiency while breaking down silos, lowering IT complexity and total cost of ownership.
A combined vision for the future
This announcement is especially exciting because BetterCloud and VMware are both championing the same cause – supporting secure, productive workspaces for employees working from anywhere.
We are tremendously excited about the opportunities from this partnership, benefiting customers as they continue to adopt SaaS applications and seek to improve experience, security and automation.
To learn more about VMware SaaS App Management and our partnership, visit our website and watch this on-demand session at VMworld and hear directly from VMware and BetterCloud product leaders!
