Co-author: Noah Wasmer, SVP and Co-General Manager for VMware End User Computing.
The verdict is in – empowered employees drive business success. Eighty-seven percent of CIOs understand that empowered employees drive revenue growth and can also drive earnings that outperform peer companies by 147% (Forbes Insights Report). Today, however, expanding heterogeneity of device and application platforms, along with increasing security risks puts IT in organizational silos that deliver complex user experiences and impacts user productivity.
At VMware, we know that empowered employees are at the heart of digital transformation that leads to successful business outcomes, and they must be enabled with the right technology to do their best work. That’s why we’re relentlessly focused on delivering an intelligence-driven platform for the digital workspace that can deliver 10x better user experiences – through an always-on, automated, on-demand workspace service that’s also 10x better on security and costs.
Workspace ONE is the leading digital workspace platform – and today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve once again raised the bar by:
- Continuing to build the intelligent platform foundation for modern management
- Extending modern management to VDI and enhancing cloud delivery
- Boosting employee engagement through end user services
Let’s take closer look at what we’ve done in these areas.
Modern Management
Modern Management is the foundation for building an intelligent platform that eliminates IT silos, and we continue to simplify the customer journey. Workspace ONE AirLift is now generally available – the AirLift connector for SCCM enables migration of SCCM Collections and PCLM workloads, including Win32 app packages, to Workspace ONE automatically, and accelerates transition to Windows 10 modern management. We have also partnered with Dell to enable a “ready to work” experience with Dell Provisioning for Workspace ONE on first boot of new Dell PCs – with all corporate Win32 apps pre-loaded and recoverable from the cloud, eliminating long download times. Finally, new industry standard Center for Internet Security (CIS) and other policy templates for over-the-air configuration of Group Policies in minutes – this ensures 100% GPO coverage beyond limited native MDM policies without any need for scripting.
To enhance security, predictive patching based on device risk and vulnerability (CVE) scores enabled in Workspace ONE Intelligence ensures devices are proactively protected and remediated prior to becoming an enterprise risk. We’re also announcing a tech preview of Workspace ONE Trust Network with Carbon Black, Netskope and Lookout and new partner integrations that break down security tools silos to leverage existing investments and accelerate remediation. An expanded ecosystem of integrated partner solutions will include: TrendMicro, CheckPoint, Palo Alto Networks, and ZScaler.
Desktop and Application Virtualization
Many organizations rely on desktop virtualization to centrally deliver Windows desktops to any device, but they often use separate tools to manage their physical Windows desktops. We’ve now previewing modern management for Windows 10 to persistent virtual desktops as well – so administrators can manage both physical devices as well as virtual desktops with the same platform, simplifying administration.
Employees expect a great user experience today and that continues to be a focus for us – Network Intelligence with support for QoS for Blast Extreme to enable simplified endpoint configuration options while improving user experience. Multi-media redirection for HTML live streaming enhances the user experience while eliminating datacenter bottlenecks. Furthermore, several GPU enhancements for Horizon 7, including AMD Radeon Pro v340 MxGPU support for simplified licensing, NVIDIA Tesla V100 graphics card support for high-end graphics, and vMotion for NVIDIA GPUs eliminate downtime and increase user productivity.
Horizon 7 on VMware Cloud on AWS will also support Instant Clones, App Volumes, and User Environment Manager in a new preview. VMware Cloud on AWS is especially appealing to customers who have an on-premises Horizon 7 deployments and want to leverage the cloud for use cases such as disaster recovery and bursting – they can try and validate these scenarios with the latest release.
We’ve also continued to enhance our Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure offering with more options with additional VM types and locations, including Azure Government, helping customers choose the Azure VM type that best suits their needs based on price and performance. For added security, integrated Azure Disk Encryption within the Horizon Cloud admin console automates the entire process of encrypting the virtual disk and provides enhanced security for Horizon Cloud desktops and apps.
End User Services
We continue to work hard to simplify the employee experience – the new Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub app brings together support for BYO and corporate owned experiences in one, streamlined app experience for the entire employee lifecycle from on-boarding to day 1 productivity and beyond. Additional capabilities include delivering notification-based actions, integrated contacts, and simpler search.
To boost employee productivity, we also continue to enhance our Workspace ONE secure productivity apps. New Workspace ONE Boxer enhancements include NIAP, Common Criteria compliance, a completely redesigned conversation interface, ENSv2 advancements including VIP notifications, external recipient highlight, calendar attachments, and view availability. The Workspace ONE Send app expands support to Content Locker for seamless, secure file editing, opening and sharing between Workspace ONE productivity apps and Microsoft Office 365 mobile apps managed by Intune. The Workspace ONE Notebook app now in beta – delivers secure, containerized tasks and notes for employees using personal, BYO devices at work helping companies embrace secure mobility.
Workspace ONE has always been an open and extensible platform and now, a more robust, flexible Workspace ONE SDK accelerates enterprise app development in alignment with IT and business requirements for security, manageability, privacy, analytics, content and experience furthering transformation of line of business processes. Also, new “1-Click integration” between Okta and Workspace ONE make it easier to ramp up delivery of SaaS apps through one consolidated catalog, including self-service capabilities for password changes and MFA for Okta SaaS apps so companies can take advantage of their existing investments in Okta and VMware with simplified interoperability and a better employee workspace catalog experience.
We’re very excited about how the latest improvements in Workspace ONE will continue to deliver on security, costs, and user experience – ultimately enabling IT to empower employees to drive impactful business outcomes. To learn more:
- Attend The Digital Workspace Keynote at VMworld to hear the latest news and insights from our leaders, ecosystem partners and customers.
- Visit our Workspace ONE website
