Customer Corner April 2022

Thank you!

First, a HUGE thanks to everyone who filled out our customer survey! We are working on analyzing the data, but we have some great insights into what we are doing right and what we need to improve upon. Our entire team is committed to a customer first, customer last mindset. We take your feedback seriously and will be using it to improve not only the product, but everything in the customer journey, from support to transactability. If you didn’t get a chance to respond, we will re-run this survey in September so we can keep measuring how we are doing.

Introducing the customer marketing team
Learn about risks from a hacker with Samy Kamkar & Abe Ankumah, April 27
Deploy an edge in the cloud! Cloud Edge Webinar, May 4
Tips and Tricks based on previous webinar
VMware Secure Access primer
Links to public training materials
Customer spotlight: Whole Foods Market
End of Support for Release 3.4.x for VMware SD-WAN Orchestrator and Gateway
April Dad joke: How does Darth Vader like his toast? On the dark side.

Have a topic you’d like to see covered in an upcoming newsletter? Let us know!

Meet our team!

Our team was created last year with the mindset “customer first, customer last.” We are here to learn about your experience, advocate for your needs within our internal teams and processes, and provide educational content to help you learn how to best use our products. The reason our team has become so important within VMware is because we have created a community of engaged, active customers and we really enjoying sharing your experiences and advocating for you. We love our jobs! While there are many faces behind this team, you may not have heard from all of us. We want to change that, so you’re not surprised when you hear from more of us. Meet all of us below!

John Turner, Director of Customer Marketing

Focus areas: Customers and Customer Journeys

Motivation: I spent 17 years working and running the networks and systems team for Brandeis University. I had the chance to work with many vendors during that time, some good and some not as good. Moving to the vendor side, I truly believe investing in our customers’ success is the most important thing we can do. In return, our customers will invest in us and make us great. I strongly believe in a Customer First, Customer Last mindset.

Kelsi Cooke, Senior Marketing Manager

Focus areas: WAN Insiders customer and partner communities, customer stories

Motivation: I’m someone who likes bringing groups together, understanding their needs and dynamics and hosting purposeful gatherings. Facilitating community comes naturally to me and is one of my passions. Additionally, helping to uncover and tell stories about why and how our customers are using our products is so fun to learn about and share more broadly!

Trent Cutler, Solutions Architect

Focus areas: Assisting customers in educating themselves within the SASE portfolio of VMware SD-WAN, VMware Edge Network Intelligence, VMware Cloud Web Security and VMware Secure Access.

Motivation: I get a lot of satisfaction out of helping others find that ‘aha’ moment in which they learn how to improve their day-to-day workflows using VMware solutions.

Scott Manning, Senior Customer Marketing Engineer

Focus areas: Webinars, customer relationships

Motivation: I really enjoy helping customers understand how to find additional value with the products they already own. Building relationships is passion of mine and translates well into this role. Providing a technical perspective to the content keeps my geekiness alive and well.

April 27th webinar: Learn about security risks from a convicted hacker!

Join us for an interactive interview and Q&A session with Samy Kamkar on April 27th at 10:30 AM PT for an off-the-record webinar. Our own Abe Ankumah, VP of SASE Products, will host a one hour session with Samy and take questions from the audience.

Samy Kamkar, known for creating the MySpace Worm, Evercookie, and other exploits, will share tales of his hacking adventures and his thoughts around the many ways that technology is creating and helping to solve cybersecurity challenges. His work has been cited by the NSA, triggered hearings on Capitol Hill, and served as the basis for security advancements across vehicles, smartphones, and other technologies.

Register today – space is limited and we will not be recording this off-the-record event.

Did you know you can deploy a VMware SD-WAN Edge in the cloud?

Well, you can! With an Edge deployed directly in your cloud presence, you can route traffic securely and directly to your cloud workloads . This can simplify cloud deployment and improve security posture by treating your workloads as internal resources.

Join us for a deep-dive webinar on the hows and whys of deploying an SD-WAN edge in the cloud!

Our cloud edge expert will go through the architecture and steps to deploy a VMware SD-WAN Edge in AWS, Azure and GCP, and then set up business policy routing to your new cloud edge.

Don’t miss this action-packed hour of technical excitement!

Tips and Tricks: Business policy rules

This month’s tip comes from our recent webinar held on March 3rd. In the webinar, Cliff Lane did a deep dive on the Business Policy section, and Jonathan Valverde went deep into the Cloud VPN section. If you missed it, you can check out the recording for that webinar and all of our previous webinars here.

The Business Policy page allows an administrator to prioritize, or de-prioritize, specific applications or categories based on business need. For example, you could prioritize Microsoft 365 traffic while de-prioritizing social media traffic. The top three rules that show up by default are purely examples of how you might create a specific application rule. They can be safely deleted at any time if desired.

Also worth noting, the Business Policy rule set uses a top-down matching process. More specific rules should be at the top moving to more generic rules at the bottom. You need to have a specific application rule above any more generic rules for that application’s category. The matching process stops for that traffic as soon as it matches a rule. The last 4 rules are locked in place and are “catch-all” rules for anything that doesn’t match a policy above them. These cannot be deleted, but the actions for the rules can be modified.

You can read more about the Business Policy page here.

VMware Secure Access Overview

VMware Secure Access is a cloud-hosted remote access solution that addresses the challenges of managing remote access across multiple regions. Based on a Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) framework, VMware Secure Access offers multiple benefits over traditional VPN solutions providing users with consistent, optimal and secure application access that protects the users from web threats.

Leveraging VMware SASE PoPs

Today organizations hairpin their remote traffic to the data center and provide little to no custom access to applications. VMware Secure Access brings off-premises users into the SD-WAN fabric for optimal routing by tunneling traffic to the 150+ global VMware SASE PoPs.

The VMware Secure Access solution uses the SASE PoPs as the first line of defense for processing end-user traffic and safeguarding the network from various threats. The PoPs provide application quality assurance and are a digital onramp for SaaS applications and cloud services. If you’d like to read more about the PoPs, check out this blog post: https://blogs.vmware.com/sase/2021/09/23/inside-vmware-sase-pops-the-engine-behind-vmware-sd-wan/

Benefits of Secure Access at a glance

Existing Workspace ONE customers can leverage the VMware PoPs to improve application performance and security with the following benefits of Secure Access:

Reduce management overhead with a cloud-hosted remote access service
Improve application performance of SaaS and cloud services by tunneling traffic directly to VMware PoPs
Utilizes Workspace ONE to reduce the yet-another-application woes.
Zero touch tunnel client configuration

Test drive Secure Access

Please have your applications and endpoint management groups review the Secure Access solution so that they’ll stop blaming the network for their issues 🙂

Links to SASE educational resources

After our surveys, we learned that many of you are seeking more opportunities to learn about SASE and VMware’s offerings. The following links will help you start that process! Please bookmark these for future reference.

Customer spotlight: Whole Foods Market

“The data we get from VMware Edge Network Intelligence reflects the actual experience that people are having, the packets flowing to and from devices. We not only can look at network health in aggregate at a high level, but breaking data out per client and being able to drill down to individual clients has been pretty excellent.”
Paul Jorgenson, Senior Network Development Engineer, Whole Foods Market

Whole Foods Market relies on data and applications running over wireless networks to manage its stores and distribution centers. When connectivity problems happen, the costs can include lost sales, bottlenecks in the flow of goods, IT time and frustration, and, worst of all, unhappy customers. Whole Foods needed a clearer picture of what was really happening in their wireless networks. After a short proof of concept, they quickly recognized that VMware Edge Network Intelligence, part of VMware SASE, could offer important benefits in addition to the solutions they had in place. Now the company has true visibility into the root causes of network problems. The IT team at Whole Foods estimates they have saved hundreds of staff hours since implementing the software.

Read more about how Whole Foods improved their wireless experience by reading the full case study.

End of Support for Release 3.4x, VMware SD-WAN Orchestrator and Gateway

As previously communicated, VMware SD-WAN software version 3.4.x for Orchestrator and Gateway has reached its end of support. To help our customers with smooth transitions, VMware has extended the period of technical guidance to September 30, 2022.

Please note that version 3.4.x for VMware SD-WAN Edge has different dates for the end of general support and end of technical guidance. For 3.4.xx SD-WAN Edge End of General Support is December 31, 2022, End of Technical Guidance is March 31, 2023.

Please see this Knowledge Base Article for details.

Customers with on-premises or dedicated Orchestrators or Gateways running code 3.4.x or prior are highly encouraged to upgrade as soon as possible. For a list of recommended software versions, refer to KB article 80741 and optionally subscribe to it to receive future recommendations. Please get in touch with VMware Technical Support to schedule an upgrade as needed.