There is no doubt that the pandemic has accelerated the digital journey for many companies. If in 2020 IT leaders were looking to quickly adapt to remote work and support their employees, in 2021 they started to look beyond any short-term fixes and implement modern platforms that support their current business objectives. This trend will continue into 2022 as companies reopen more offices and are strategizing on a hybrid model.
As we wrap up 2021, I wanted to highlight a few of the announcements we have made this past year and especially how they are tied to key IT trends and – more importantly – to our customers’ priorities and business objectives.
Digital Employee Experience (DEX)
It’s no secret that the pandemic has brought working styles such as hybrid and remote work to the mainstream. As companies offer their employees the choice of hybrid work environment (or in some cases full remote), IT teams carry the burden of providing the technology to support that and are also being measured on how end-users experience those technologies. As a response to that, the market for Digital Employee Experience (DEX) tools has been accelerated. To learn more, I encourage you to read this blog explaining what DEX is.
This year we have made a number of important announcements for new capabilities in our Digital Employee Experience Management (DEEM) solution, and I wanted to make sure you don’t miss out:
Incidents
Oftentimes dashboards will show you that there’s a problem, and then IT starts to investigate the root cause of it. They often need to access multiple dashboards and reports spanning across multiple tools. We created Incidents to fix that. Incidents brings all the information relevant for the issue in hand into a single place, so your IT can focus on the solution. Soon it will also leverage machine learning for remediation recommendations and self-healing workflows.
Employee Sentiment through Surveys
Monitoring KPIs can help identify and remediate issues, but it won’t always represent a true picture of the perceived employee experience. Getting qualitative feedback from employees is important to get a holistic employee experience visibility, and is clearly top of mind for our customers. Through an integration between Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub and DEEM, IT will be able to gather employee sentiment though in-context qualitative surveys that will be analyzed and incorporated in the overall employee experience score.
Workspace ONE Intelligence for Horizon
In many organizations, end-user services include both physical devices and virtual desktops. A consistent approach to monitoring all end users’ endpoints is crucial to optimize operations and improve overall employee experience. This year we announced that Workspace ONE Intelligence will support Horizon, bringing advanced analytics and end-to-end visibility for physical devices and virtual desktops through a single pane of glass, and delivering a holistic view of end-user experience.
Hyperautomation
Hyperautomation was identified by Gartner as one of top technology trends for 2022. As the name suggests, it’s about automating manual, repetitive tasks, and taking automation to the next level. By leveraging AI and machine learning frameworks, you can “automate the automation” and automate tasks that we couldn’t automate before.
At VMworld 2021, we announced Insights and Anomaly Detection, new features in our Digital Employee Experience Management (DEEM) solution. Insights will leverage machine learning models to automatically calculate a normal range for each KPI in the system, and alert you in case it detects an anomaly, which means that values are outside the normal range. Over time, Insights will learn and adjust the range based on what’s happening in the environment, freeing IT from setting up and guessing thresholds, and maintaining alerts.
We also announced that Freestyle Orchestrator will be available for Windows 10 and macOS, and later for mobile as well. I’m excited to say it is now available with the Workspace ONE UEM 2111 release. Freestyle Orchestrator is an IT orchestration platform that helps modern IT admins automate the most complex tasks with nested conditions and a wide range of actions, with a low-code canvas UI. It brings a whole new set of automation use cases for managing devices and apps at scale such as desired state management and app sequencing.
SaaS App Management
Over the last few years, we have seen the rise of SaaS app adoption across all industries. While there are many benefits to SaaS, there are also challenges. For example, visibility into what apps used in their organization, license utilization and data being shared. To help our customers mitigate those challenges, we have partnered with BetterCloud, the leading SaaS Management Platform (SMP) provider, to launch VMware SaaS App Management by BetterCloud. VMware SaaS App Management helps customers:
- Discover which SaaS apps are being used, and monitor license utilization.
- Manage SaaS apps across the employee lifecycle, from onboarding through lifecycle changes (such as promotions and changing roles) and offboarding.
- Secure SaaS apps usage with predefined guardrails that enable IT to detect when sensitive data is being shared, fine-grained permissions to grant the right level of access and auditing capabilities for compliance.
VMware SaaS App Management is available today as an add-on to Workspace ONE and Horizon customers, in the US only. Get a FREE SaaS assessment of your environment by filling out this form.
Onwards to 2022
Our mission has always been to support our customers on their digital journey and help them achieve their business objectives. I can’t wait to see what 2022 will bring!
