Today, we’re showcasing several important updates that are a big deal for modernization and the automation capabilities in VMware Anywhere Workspace.
Specifically, we’re proud to unveil our modernized Workspace ONE SaaS architecture, announce the availability of Freestyle Orchestrator in Workspace ONE Intelligence, and highlight the recent release of the Workspace ONE Marketplace and Apps on Demand for published apps. We first spoke about these announcements at VMware Explore — some of them in San Francisco and some in Barcelona — and we’re excited to hear feedback as customers begin using these new features.
Bharath Rangarajan, GM and VP of Products and UX for VMware EUC shared an overview of today’s updates in the video below.
Today’s Anywhere Workspace updates
The next-gen Workspace ONE SaaS architecture represents the culmination of a multi-year effort to re-factor Workspace ONE using cloud and SaaS best practices. This new version enables several important outcomes. First, the platform has better performance, with 10x improvements to app and profile delivery (per our initial internal testing), scale for organizations with millions of devices, and a smoother admin experience. Second, it enables us to deliver features and updates faster. And third, it makes it much easier to build additional offerings and new experiences on top of Workspace ONE. In fact, several of our newer offerings — including Freestyle Orchestrator, desired state management, and Linux support — are built on this new architecture.
While Freestyle Orchestrator started out with support for Windows and macOS, and more recently mobile operating systems, our goal was always to make it global in nature. Freestyle Orchestrator is now available in Workspace ONE Intelligence, replacing the previous automation engine. Freestyle Orchestrator has already generated huge amounts of interest from customers who are looking to streamline complicated workflows, and we can’t wait to see what customers build in Intelligence.
Workspace ONE Marketplace provides an interface to find pre-packaged solutions — including templates for dashboards, reports, widgets, and workflows — as well as the content to help get started. This will enable customers to discover and more quickly adopt solutions for common use cases, instead of building dashboards, workflows, and other components themselves.
Apps on Demand for published apps uses our App Volumes technology to attach apps to generic RDSH hosts as needed. As a result, there’s no need to build out dedicated siloed farms, leading to time savings and more efficient use of resources. Plus, maintenance and patching are easier. Apps on Demand for published apps supports Horizon, Citrix, and Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop environments, in the cloud or on premises.
The significance of today’s updates: Continuing our journey to autonomous workspaces.
Back at Explore 2022, we shared the latest evolution of our strategy, the concept of autonomous workspaces.
In a time when organizations are seeking to reduce operational overhead, the idea behind the autonomous workspace concept is to use rich contextual data and data science to power much more sophisticated automations. The result is a digital workspace platform that delivers self-configuring, self-securing, and self-healing outcomes. This builds on our earlier guiding principles of unification and automation.
If you want to envision the difference between automation and autonomy, think of the difference between cruise control and a self-driving car. One is a simple, if-this-than-that workflow, the other takes in large amounts of data, processes it with data science, and uses it to make decisions about how to accomplish a goal.
What’s important to remember is that the concept of autonomous workspaces represents a guiding principle in our product — it’s not a product or SKU that you can go out and buy. However, there are already plenty of exciting features that embody the autonomous workspace concept, and more will be coming over time.
I encourage you to watch our keynotes from VMware Explore U.S. and Europe to learn more and to see demos of how the concept is embodied in features like desired state management, guided root cause analysis, and more.
Today’s announcements continue our journey toward the autonomous workspace and lay the foundation for many more of these features and developments.
Learn more
In addition to today’s announcements blogs linked in this article, here are more resources about these updates at Tech Zone.
