The Tech Orchard team had the pleasure of attending VMware Explore 2023 in Las Vegas, a power-packed event that a gave us an opportunity to network with other leaders in our space while gaining access to critical updates for enhancing customers’ digital transformations. The conference focused on five areas of IT and professional development: cloud and edge infrastructure, modern applications and cloud management, networking and security, hybrid workforce, and vision and innovation. Here’s a brief summary of our top takeaways.

The pursuit of an autonomous workspace

Autonomous workspace is a concept (not an individual product) that is VMware’s north star for the future of end-user computing. It means going beyond creating a unified workspace with basic automations, to analyzing huge amounts of data with AI and machine learning to drive more advanced, context-aware automations. This leads to a workspace that can be considered self-configuring, self-healing, and self-securing.

Recent updates that support this pursuit include Apps on Demand for published apps; new platform services like Freestyle Orchestrator for Intelligence and Workspace ONE Marketplace; enhanced Workspace ONE Mobile Threat Defense with Phishing and Content Protection; and introduced Digital Employee Experience Management for Horizon.

Digital employee experience

VMware’s broad approach to digital employee experience (DEX) involves delivering, measuring, analyzing, and remediating experience across mobile, desktop, virtual, and frontline use cases. They are continuing to expand across all these dimensions.

This year, they are announcing several new ways to measure experience, including synthetic network testing, Horizon in-guest session and network monitoring, and more.

To analyze experience, they are sharing enhancements to the Workspace ONE Intelligence Insights feature, which uses machine learning to detect anomalous security, experience, and performance issues in an EUC environment. The next-gen architecture builds Insights more easily for different types of data, including for Horizon and frontline use cases.

For remediation, a new playbooks framework will soon be available in Workspace ONE Intelligence. Playbooks will help IT organizations scale effectiveness by providing the helpdesk with step-by-step instructions for handling recurring issues right in the console, and crucially, the ability to analyze the success rates of these steps.

Unified endpoint management and security

VMware’s featured announcement is the upcoming cloud-native integration between Intel vPro® and Workspace ONE UEM. One key use case will be to wake up or power on remote vPro-enabled Windows devices to install patches. This integration builds on the previous phase of VMware’s Intel vPro partnership, offering a solution that is now simpler to deploy.

Just before Explore, VMware shared news on enhanced patch management capabilities for Windows; the general availability of shared device conditional access with VMware Workspace ONE and Microsoft Entra ID; and zero-touch enrollment for XR devices. During the event, they announced updates on new critical functionality and long-asked-for features.

You can expect expanded Declarative Device Management that enables more efficient configuration and compliance, as well as improved support for managing macOS updates to bring greater flexibility and compliance while saving administrator time. Specifically, in addition to the new macOS Updates Dashboard in Workspace ONE UEM, hundreds of new payloads and keys are being added for macOS.

Administrators in shared SaaS environments (and dedicated SaaS environments by request) also now have more flexibility in determining which version of the Intelligent Hub is deployed to their newly enrolled devices. Finally, with Freestyle Orchestrator, Workspace ONE administrators can combine their profiles, scripts, sensors, and applications into a conditional and sequential workflow to automate execution in complex use cases. Freestyle Orchestrator support for macOS continues to be a focus.

Virtual apps and desktops

VMware shared more about their Apps Everywhere vision with VMware App Volumes for unifying app delivery and full lifecycle management across any VDI, DaaS or published app cloud.

In support of this vision, they have several new updates for App Volumes and the Apps on Demand functionality included in it:

  • App Volumes support for persistent virtual desktops — beta coming soon
  • Apps on Demand support for Horizon Cloud next-gen – coming soon
  • Apps on Demand support for Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop RemoteApp streaming — coming soon
  • Apps on Demand support for Amazon AppStream 2.0 — coming soon

Also in Horizon news, support for Microsoft Windows 365 is going into public preview, and the Horizon Accelerator offering is now available.

If you didn’t have a chance to enjoy the excitement of VMware Explore 2023 firsthand, check out great recap coverage in blog and video format. Or if you’re interested in learning more about how these features and functionality can be deployed to benefit your team and organization, schedule a call with us.