THE ROOT GROUP NEWSLETTER

Best known for creating what has become the gold standard of virtualized compute architectures, VMware has greatly expanded their focus into the End User Compute market over the past number of years. With Horizon and other virtual desktop management tools in place, VMware purchased AirWatch and Carbon Black as two key technologies to add to their existing technologies to form an end point management platform called WorkspaceONE. This platform is designed to integrate access control, app management and endpoint protection. The promise is to provide users “consumer easy” access to any authorized corporate application while allowing a single IT administrator to efficiently manage and secure thousands of end points, all without encroaching on an end user’s personal use of their devices.

While it would be hard to bet against VMware pulling this off given their track record with ESXi, this unified architecture requires participation from a variety of competitors. For example, Microsoft‘s Windows 10 APIs and Apple’s High Sierra releases give IT professionals the access to the tools that work in their own environments, just as they do on iOS and Android devices. Add in Chrome devices, ruggedized gear, cloud and on-premises versions and VMware is biting off a huge chunk of the end user management space. Coined UEM (Unified Endpoint Management), VMware’s ambitions are not necessarily trying to “be all things to all people” and include APIs and SDKs that allow 3^rd parties like CrowdStrike and Netskope to extend the security capabilities of WorkspaceONE to ingest, process, share and correlate threat data. This underscores the reality that no one solution is able to offer a one-size fits all for a given security posture.

VMware states that its digital workspace platform can deploy, manage and secure any app to any user on any device from anywhere at any time. They also point out that they are unique in the market because they deliver native Windows apps on Windows10, native Mac apps on macOS and native phone apps on their respective operating system platforms. They are not supporting these as remote Windows apps as do other vendors. WorkspaceONE also offers context-aware actions that are presented to users in ways that are more intuitive than separate actions. For example, “Approve” or “Deny” buttons can be inserted into an email message from ServiceNow, Concor or similar apps that allow the user to take actions without leaving the email app.

We invite you to attend a webinar on Thursday, March 11 at 10 a.m. to understand how this technology is more that just a unified end point management, desktop virtualization and mobile device management platform. We will have VMware partner Arrow Electronic talk through use-cases of people who have deployed these solutions and understand the results they are seeing. Invitations will be forthcoming and feel free to reach out to your Root Group Account Manager to discuss further if you have questions.