In today’s fast-changing world — and for 2022, that’s not just as a cliché — it can be beneficial and balancing to take stock of what you have done over the last year.
We are doing just that by looking at the 10 most important announcements and releases of 2022 for VMware Anywhere Workspace, which includes our digital employee experience (DEX), workspace security, virtual apps and desktops, and unified endpoint management solutions.
Digital employee experience announcements
For some background, in 2022 one of the main things we’ve been talking about in digital employee experience is how our solution benefits from the rest of the VMware Anywhere Workspace platform. Many DEX solutions focus on just measuring and analyzing experience. We do this with Workspace ONE Intelligence, as well as the Digital Employee Experience Management capabilities that are part of Intelligence. (In fact, we were recently recognized for these capabilities in an analyst report.) But we also go further, because we can focus on delivering employee experiences through Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub, as well as Workspace ONE UEM and VMware Horizon. Then, after experiences are measured and analyzed, we can remediate issues through integrations with UEM, or via a remote support session with Workspace ONE Assist.
We have been expanding the scope of the devices and scenarios that our DEX solution can address, providing customers with a more complete approach to experience management. Here are some of the top ways we did this in 2022.
- We released micro-surveys in Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub, expanding the data that customers can measure to include user sentiment and feedback. The surveys can be very targeted and triggered by events in Intelligence, giving extremely granular feedback, but they can also be used to feed into experience scores for a more holistic view.
- We expanded the scope of Workspace ONE Intelligence to include VMware Horizon, including support for experience scores in Horizon.
- We introduced support for Digital Employee Experience Management for macOS, as well as for third-party managed Windows devices. Remember that our other DEX portfolio products — including Intelligent Hub, Assist, and Tunnel — all support a wide range of managed and unmanaged devices, so you can have a consistent experience offering across your enterprise, even for devices that aren’t enrolled in Workspace ONE UEM.
- The Workspace ONE ITSM Connector for ServiceNow gives IT helpdesk workers more power to resolve experience issues.
Workspace security announcements
VMware Horizon and Workspace ONE UEM have long played a key part in security, with our conditional access, authentication, and Tunnel capabilities playing important roles. In 2022, we made another crucial addition.
- We partnered with Lookout to create Workspace ONE Mobile Threat Defense, which was announced and became available in June. Later in the year, we announced the upcoming beta of phishing and content protection. It’s easy to say that mobile cybersecurity threats are on the rise, but when you consider the number of phishing SMS and other messages that our devices receive daily, the need for this type of mobile content protection really hits home.
VMware Horizon announcements
The innovations (as well as analyst recognition) continued for Horizon.
- The highly anticipated general availability of Horizon Cloud next-gen came in August at VMware Explore 2022 US, enabling greater scalability, lower cost, advanced automation, and improved visibility for customers. We followed up by announcing support for connecting on-prem and cloud-based Horizon 8 workloads at Explore Europe.
- In June, we introduced new ways for customers to take advantage of our SaaS-based Horizon Control Plane services for on-premises and single-cloud deployments — the Horizon Standard Plus Subscription and Horizon Enterprise Plus Subscription.
- Explore Europe brought an announcement that many long-time published app shops should appreciate: Published Apps on Demand. This capability, coming soon, uses VMware App Volumes to attach apps to generic RDSH farms on demand, as opposed to building out traditional app farms.
UEM and platform-wide services announcements
Within Workspace ONE UEM, we continue to deliver on the promise of truly unified endpoint management. We were pleased to be recognized for this achievement in recent IDC and Gartner analyst reports calling out our capabilities in UEM, rugged device management, and Apple device management, as well as use cases for security-centric management, modern Windows PC management, remote worker management, and nonstandard PC management.
Stepping back and looking at our entire platform, we’re eager to continue taking UEM, and EUC in general, to the next level. For many years we focused on unification and then automation. At VMware Explore 2022, we articulated the guiding principles for the next stage of our journey — the autonomous workspace concept. At a basic level, this model employs data science to analyze the massive amounts of contextual data in an EUC environment, and then uses the subsequent insights to take action. The results go beyond simple if-this-then-that style automations to much more advanced automations that proactively maintain the desired state of the workspace, with little to no human intervention. You can read more about the autonomous workspace concept, and you will hear much more about this in 2023.
When it comes to our biggest product and feature-specific announcements of the year in UEM and related services, two stand out.
- Freestyle Orchestrator, which initially focused on workflows for desktop devices, is expanding to support mobile devices, Workspace ONE Intelligence, and third-party apps that integrate with Intelligence. This means that Freestyle Orchestrator will be a centralized place for automations across your EUC environment and beyond.
- The upcoming Workspace ONE Cloud Marketplace will feature pre-defined solutions and third-party integrations via scripts, templates, and other resources.
Events and people
This year also saw the return to in-person events with VMware Explore (formerly known as VMworld) held around the world. I know I speak for all my colleagues when I say that it was energizing and joyful to spend time with our broad EUC community of customers, partners, colleagues, and industry friends.
As we reflect on what we’ve done in 2022, we are incredibly excited for what’s ahead in 2023.
