by: VMware Senior Manager, Authentication Services Robert Coggins; VMware Director, Client Foundation Services Orlando Diaz; VMware Senior Director, Information Systems John Drummond; and VMware Manager, Service Operations Vasil Kaftandzhiev
Despite the media hype, not every enterprise cloud venture results in a success story from a return on investment (ROI) standpoint. While they offer significant benefits over traditional solutions, there can be hidden costs and other factors that mitigate any positive financial results.
How we managed to make it happen
With the proliferation of operating systems, hardware, mobile devices, and geographically dispersed offices, VMware IT knew traditional management solutions were unable to meet these demands. The answer came in the form of cloud-based VMware Workspace ONE® Unified Endpoint Management (UEM). Workspace ONE UEM enables a seamless consolidation of management silos across mobile devices, laptops, desktops (Windows 10, macOS, iOS, and Android) and rugged devices. The goal was to reduce costs and improve security with real-time, over-the-air (OTA) management across all use cases, including BYOD—colleagues who bring their own devices.
But would Workspace ONE UEM deliver on its promised ROI?
After a completed fiscal year, VMware IT did an ROI assessment on the various aspects of the new system. First-year expectations were restrained given the entire infrastructure was new to both colleagues and support teams.
Workspace ONE UEM demonstrated a 105% return on investment versus VMware’s traditional support activities and tools (January 2018 – January 2019). This is based on 24,193 colleagues spread across the globe and the standard price of $25 per user license for Workspace One UEM plus VMware Identity Manager™ as a standard VMware offering.
This result was possible as the new platform replaced expenses normally incurred for:
- Peer-to-peer software
- Native encryption management tool
- macOS management tool
- Device provisioning, support and management
- Shipping of devices
It also dramatically streamlined overall deployment and support activities inherent with new-device provisioning. Devices were normally shipped to IT deployment teams first, prior to ever reaching the colleague. Deployment therefore involved unboxing, imaging, configuring, personal delivery/retrieval of new/old computers and Power On, ‘handholding’ of colleagues to ensure complete satisfaction, and then laborious asset management data entry of new machines.
The associated deployment support activities would typically consume 20% of any given engineer’s overall work time, a significant drain on productivity. With Workspace ONE UEM, these efforts are eliminated as modern endpoint management gives us the opportunity to provide a fully configured endpoint to the colleague straight from the factory.
But wait, there’s more . . .
The benefits Workspace ONE UEM offered in these areas went beyond simple costs savings. While we are still rolling this out globally, we are seeing savings of approximately 45 minutes per machine. This may seem like a low figure until you multiply it by 24,193 colleagues. Total time (deployment + support) saved per year was 31,331 hours, or 783 weeks. This allowed us to take IT personnel out of the back office doing redundant tasks to working on other initiatives with colleagues.
Combined, this ROI reduced operational overhead and allowed for priority shifts to other products and create to focus on innovation.
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