VMware unveils Next-gen Workspace ONE SaaS platform
VMware is introducing new enhancements to its Anywhere Workspace platform, aimed at helping organizations tackle the challenges of managing operational complexities and supporting employees in a hybrid workforce. These enhancements include radical changes to the Workspace ONE architecture, allowing for high performance and scalability for millions of endpoints, and innovations in VMware App Volumes, significantly reducing management time and infrastructure cost for virtual app and desktop environments. The aim is to enable IT teams to run more efficient digital workspaces, delivering productive and reliable experiences for their hybrid workforce.
New Workspace ONE platform services
Modernizing Workspace ONE SaaS architecture promises better performance and scalability, enabling customers to scale deployments to millions of devices while experiencing high performance and improved console load times. A modular architecture also allows for more responsive development and greater product reliability, providing same-day feature support for the latest OEM and platform configurations. The modern architecture powers new platform services, including Workspace ONE Freestyle Orchestrator and Desired State Management, providing a low-code and automated toolkit for IT to solve higher-order business problems across endpoint management, security, and user experience.
Freestyle Orchestrator and Workspace ONE Marketplace
VMware’s unified orchestration framework extends Freestyle Orchestrator capabilities beyond UEM use-cases, making it available across all Workspace ONE services and third-party applications. Additionally, the new Workspace ONE Marketplace provides pre-packaged solutions, actions, templates, and scripts, bringing more efficiency and simplicity for IT, streamlining use cases such as onboarding and offboarding, license optimization, security quarantine workflows, and more.
VMware Apps on Demand
Finally, VMware’s Apps on Demand functionality reduces management time and infrastructure costs for traditionally published app deployments, using VMware App Volumes to eliminate the need for a dedicated app farm infrastructure. This results in a modern app delivery model that deploys apps on demand as users access them to generic RDSH servers, simplifying app and OS management and reducing the number of images IT needs to create and manage.
Reducing management overhead
The result is a radical reduction in management overhead and infrastructure costs, allowing customers to capture even legacy apps with 99% app compatibility and publish them anywhere, whether on-prem, in the cloud, or across hybrid cloud deployments.
Delivering productive and reliable experiences
VMware’s new enhancements address organizations’ challenges in managing operational complexities and supporting a hybrid workforce, enabling IT teams to run more efficient digital workspaces that deliver productive and reliable experiences. Organizations can scale their deployments to millions of devices by automating processes and modernizing architectures while experiencing high performance, reduced management time, and infrastructure costs. VMware’s innovations, such as the Workspace ONE Marketplace and Apps on Demand functionality, also bring greater efficiency and simplicity for IT, streamlining use cases such as onboarding and offboarding, license optimization, security quarantine workflows, and more.
These innovations provide a low-code and automated toolkit for IT to solve higher-order business problems across endpoint management, security, and user experience. By providing a unified orchestration framework that extends Freestyle Orchestrator capabilities beyond UEM use cases, VMware empowers IT teams to build powerful, policy-based workflows with a modern, low-code canvas user interface. The platform services powered by the modern architecture also enable new value-add services, such as Workspace ONE Freestyle Orchestrator and Desired State Management, which can help organizations automate processes and improve operational efficiency.
Helping with challenges of evolving hybrid workforce
VMware’s innovations come when organizations are navigating the evolving requirements of a hybrid workforce. By providing high performance and scalability for millions of endpoints and reducing management time and infrastructure costs for virtual app and desktop environments, VMware’s enhancements can enable IT teams to deliver productive and reliable experiences for their hybrid workforce. Additionally, VMware’s automation-powered innovations can greatly improve operational efficiency while transforming the IT workforce, as evidenced by the 87% of organizations surveyed in a recent VMware report who say they have increased their automation investment in the last two years. With VMware’s new enhancements, organizations have the power to integrate automation into every step of their IT workflow seamlessly.
New architecture direction and desired state management
The VMware EUC team embarked on a journey to redefine Workspace ONE’s vision for a modern architecture that delivers unprecedented customer value. This vision enables organizations to scale deployments to millions of devices, experience high performance and automation, and prioritize business outcomes over IT tasks.
The first step involved refactoring the monolithic architecture to modern microservices, creating self-contained, modular, and scalable functions. This reshaping powered the launch of Workspace ONE Freestyle Orchestrator, a modern solution that exemplifies the platform’s new services-based architecture.
The platform’s evolution also includes a paradigm shift towards desired state management (DSM), which focuses on the higher-order state of the device rather than the instruction set. Workspace ONE is now architected to detect and remedy device drifts from the desired state, unlocking significant opportunities for better security and streamlined device management. This evolution towards DSM was ahead of its time and has been embraced by Apple’s Declarative Management and Google’s AMAPI.
Additional Resources
Dive deeper into today’s announcements on the VMware End-User Computing Blog
Workspace ONE SaaS Modernization
Workspace ONE Intelligence and Freestyle Orchestrator
Workspace ONE Marketplace
Apps on Demand for Published Apps
Video: Workspace ONE SaaS Architecture and Apps on Demand
Download the “The Distributed Work Dilemma: When Innovation and Job Satisfaction Compete” report here.
Learn more about VMware Anywhere Workspace
Wrapping up
VMware’s Anywhere Workspace platform enhancements offer organizations the tools to manage operational complexities and support employees in a hybrid workforce. By modernizing the Workspace ONE architecture, providing a unified orchestration framework, and reducing management time and infrastructure costs, VMware empowers IT teams to run more efficient digital workspaces that deliver productive and reliable experiences for their hybrid workforce. These enhancements also enable organizations to automate processes, improve operational efficiency, and transform their IT workforce to meet the evolving requirements of a hybrid workforce.
