VMware Updates Workspace One To Offer Any App On Any Device

VMware has updated its Workspace One portfolio to offer unified access to business data and applications from any device.

The platform, which VMware calls a “digital workspace portfolio” is a mixture of identity, application and enterprise mobility management. It was introduced in early 2016, and has now received its first significant update at VMworld Europe 2016 in Barcelona.

Announced by VMware’s head of end-user computing Sanjay Poonen, Workspace One Essentials enables companies to standardise on digital workspaces that can be used on all end-user types and use cases. New data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities have also been added for Office 365 applications.

The final update sees the expansion of Workspace One’s single sign-on features to cover all enterprise web applications.

BYOD

These updates are aimed at those businesses that have implemented a bring your own device (BYOD) initiative. It enables users with personal devices unmanaged by IT to access any approved corporate application they need, through what VMware calls an “identity-defined workspace.”

Workspace One essentially containerises enterprise applications from the rest of the device. This stops any sensitive information from being copied out of the corporate application. For example, users cannot copy and paste information from an internal financial document to Twitter.

Speaking at VMworld Europe 2016 in Barcelona, Poonen said these updates flesh out VMware’s strategy of enabling end users to run any application from any device and helping IT support
users’ needs.

“When you think about the world of any apps, you can divide them into three groups: Windows Client/Server apps, web applications and mobile native. As much as we’d love them all to be HTML5 and mobile native, there’s still a big part of the world that’s Client/Server, around 40 percent,” he said.

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“You also have the Apple world of iOS and macOS, the Google world of Chrome and Android and, increasingly, what will become Windows 10. And to achieve this idea of any app on any device they all have to be brought together. That’s what Workspace One does, brings together all the key ingredients in one holistic solution.”

“The core goal is to ensure users have choice and IT has control,” he said, echoing the message from day one of VMworld Europe 2016. Poonen also teased a future update to Workspace One by announcing that Google’s Machine Learning technologies will be integrated at a later date.

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