Digital transformation and remote-work trends are inspiring innovative employee experience software. There are more work applications, mobile devices and logins in the new corporate landscape. They may result in sprawl that is difficult for employees to handle.

The complexity calls for an improved digital interface for end-user computing, according to Shankar Iyer (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of end-user computing at VMware Inc.

This must be comprehensive enough to bring all necessary pieces into a central place; and it must be easy and employee friendly. “To do that, you need a platform,” Iyer said. “Because I can’t just give you a pretty app running in your laptop and say, ‘Great, that’s the end of the employee experience.’ It’s fundamentally transforming the whole environment.”

The key is bringing the heterogeneity under control. The modern employee experience should be streamlined and digitally assisted. And security for the multiple-device, nationally or globally dispersed workforce must be made simpler, Iyer added.

Iyer spoke with Dave Vellante and John Furrier, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld event in San Francisco. They discussed device security, VMware’s employee experience strategy and its new announcements (see the full interview with transcript here). 

Risky business

VMware has taken aim at the employee experience market with Workspace ONE, an enterprise platform with consumer-grade self-service. It delivers and manages any app on any smartphone, tablet or laptop.

Security is a prime example of how frustrating and rickety employee experience can be. Workers are sick and tired of hitting impasses in their own companies, according to Iyer. They do not want to compromise productivity due to a login problem or identity check.

“‘Heck, figure it out,’ is what the users say to IT, especially the millennials,” he said.

Workspace ONE gives employees more autonomy with VMware Identity Manager and AirWatch Enterprise Mobility Management for granular risk-based access policies. And the company just announced Workspace risk analytics, featuring NSX virtualized networking microsegmentation. It assigns a risk score to devices. It may then intelligently block sensitive apps and allow access to others based on the score.

Additional announcements include a virtual assistant to boost worker productivity, as well as digital employee experience management, which scores IT on user-experience metrics.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s extensive coverage of VMworld: 

Photo: SiliconANGLE