VMworld 2019: Businesses Seek to Transform User Experience Through Digital Workspace
Although simplifying workflows and enabling productivity remain the major themes of the VMworld 2019 conference, the focus Tuesday morning shifted to the end-user experience. In several announcements this week, VMware has shown a determination to engage employees and ultimately help organizations grow, expand and transform their business.
“Addressing employee experience holistically — from hire through retire — must be at the heart of every company’s digital workspace design and is paramount to workforce transformation success,” said Shankar Iyer, senior vice president and general manager of end-user computing for VMware, in a news release.
VMware unveiled innovations being made across its Workspace ONE platform Tuesday, including a digital concierge powered by IBM Watson assistant, a boosted experience for users across mobile and desktop, and multicloud virtual desktop and app support. And while the employee experience bears the primary focus, VMware made it clear that it has not overlooked the teams and tools necessary to make that happen.
“End-user computing is focused on three pillars.” Sanchin Sharma, senior product line marketing manager for VMware, told BizTech. “First is the employee experience, second is the modern management of devices and third is security.”
Sharma explained that this approach to end-user computing will enable employees to have a better experience no matter where they are, while simultaneously making the lives of IT workers easier — and not compromising security in the process.
“With Workspace ONE,” Iyer said, “IT can more confidently empower employees to be productive by providing access to the resources they need while simultaneously advancing the organization’s modern management and zero-trust security initiatives.” Companies attending the conference voiced their shared excitement regarding advancements in digital workspace to improve the end-user experience.
Veeam Simplifies Operations for IT Teams
At VMworld, Veeam, a global leader in cloud data management and long-standing partner of VMware, shared with BizTech some of the ways their upcoming capabilities are addressing the needs of the end user.
“One of the capabilities we have coming soon is instant recovery to vSphere,” Danny Allen, vice president of product strategy at Veeam, said. “This capability will allow users to take a workload from anywhere at the press of a button.” Allen expanded upon this concept of simplicity, adding that to the end user, the request truly is presented as a single button.
The company, Allen noted, is also working to minimize recovery time objectives. He stated that while Veeam performs all of the work on the back end to orchestrate the failover from point A to point B, the goal is to make sure the end user never has to know that their data moved.
Another major product focus for Veeam is their Backup for Microsoft Office 365.
“Backup for Microsoft Office 365 is the fastest-growing product in the history of Veeam,” said Allen. “Customers are often surprised when they go to Office 365 and find out that Microsoft doesn’t back up their data. The user has a recycle bin, but after 30 days it’s gone.”
With Backup for Microsoft Office 365, Veeam eliminates the risk of employees losing access and control to their Office 365 data, which improves the digital workspace in an unobtrusive yet necessary way.
SEE MORE: Get started on transformation with digital workspace solutions.
For ThinPrint, End-User Experience Is Top of Mind
ThinPrint, an enterprise printing solutions company, is creating products and solutions to enhance the experience of both its customer’s employees and IT staff on a daily basis. Through solutions such as ThinPrint Engine and ThinPrint Hub, ThinPrint is working to increase printing performance and ease the strain on IT departments.
When the company acquired an early version of ezeep, a print management solution, four years ago, ThinPrint was mainly working with enterprises in corporate offices that typically had IT staff who managed their printers. With the acquisition, ThinPrint quickly had to adapt its strategy, since ezeep operated mainly in a coworking environment.
“It was a learning experience for us,” Henning Volkmer, president and CEO of ThinPrint and enterprise mobile solutions company Cortado, told BizTech. “We were used to working with IT staff, but in a coworking space you typically just have a community manager. That person knows how to operate their own computer, but probably doesn’t care about printing other than that it needs to work.”
The company recently announced it has been selected as a launch partner for Windows Virtual Desktop, designing a print solution specifically for use by Windows 10 multisession desktops hosted on Azure. The solution, which is an overhauled version of ezeep, enables a simple, secure connection to existing print infrastructure for all organizations regardless of their size, industry or region.
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Read more articles from BizTech’s coverage of VMworld 2019 here.
