VMware on Tuesday is rolling out the “Anywhere Workspace,” a suite of tools packaged together to help organizations keep their distributed workforces engaged and working securely.
The new offering combines VMware’s Workspace One, its digital workspace platform, with endpoint security from VMware’s Carbon Black and VMware’s SASE product.
“Even though each of these three products are best-in-class leaders, customers are asking us to do more to bring these together in an integrated offering, where each product capability builds on the capabilities of the others,” Shawn Bass, VMware’s CTO of end-user computing, told reporters. VMware, he said, has built “unique integrations that deliver customer value in ways that couldn’t be done as a standalone offering.”
The Anywhere Workspace suite responds to the series of challenges that organizations began confront in a major way last year, when the pandemic forced companies to embrace distributed work. Employees are using a variety of devices — some work-issued and some personal — to try to access data and application from hybrid, multi-cloud environments.
“It boils down to three main [problems],” said Shankar Iyer, VMware’s SVP and GM of end-user computing. “The first is sub-optimal experience for employees. The second is fragmented security models because there is no longer a trusted device within a corporate network accessing an application inside the data center — it spans a distributed edge. Finally, there’s tremendous operational complexity.”
To address these challenges, VMware is offering the Anywhere Workspace suite of tools as an alternative to a collection of point solutions. By offering a more holistic set of tools for distributed workforces, it should help reduce friction between workers and IT, VMware contends, and it should reduce costs and overhead.
The three main value propositions of Anwhere Workspace, Iyer said, come down to:
- enabling a multi-modal work experience, given employees a choice of devices with high-quality experiences
- providing security across the distributed edge, delivered in a zero trust model that leverages situational intelligence and connected control points
- providing automation and analytics to the workspace, driven by outcomes, so IT can state the outcome they wish to achieve
VMware Anywhere Workspace features unique integration points between the solutions, such as a Carbon Black Cloud and Workspace One integration to bring physical and virtual endpoint management and security capabilities together. Workspace One and SASE services are integrated to deliver zero trust network access over globally deployed POPs. More unique integrations are planned over time.
