VMware Partners Call DEX Products’ Latest Flex A ‘Win-Win’

‘User experience monitoring and management has long been a blind spot for environments, though it represents a considerable burden of time and effort to support. VMware DEX is a win-win for customers and partners,’ Matt Kozloski, vice president of Professional Services at VMware partner Winslow Technology Group, tells CRN.

VMware has taken the wraps off four new features of its employee experience-focused DEX products, which speed up time to customer ticket resolution and can mitigate some problems before they hit.

Tara Fine, vice president of VMware’s Americas partner organization, said the new DEX features build on the company’s strategy of helping partners run their businesses better and become more profitable now, while laying the groundwork for the future.

“When it comes to delivering a digital employee experience, neither partners nor their customers benefit from patchwork competitive solutions that weren’t designed to work in unison to address both IT and user requirements. VMware offers partners a more holistic platform that delivers all four components of digital employee experience,” Fine said. “Partners can then layer more profitable and higher value professional and managed services to help their customers implement their hybrid workforce initiatives.”

[RELATED: Broadcom, VMware Stocks Surge On Report Of European Deal Clearance ]

The enhancements include the general availability of DEX for Windows third-party managed devices, DEX for VMware Horizon, AI-driven guided root-cause analysis (RCA), as well as the expansion of Workspace ONE ITSM Connector.

“This makes it not only easier for IT teams to support, but much faster in terms of time to resolution,” said Gary McConnell, CEO of VirtuIT, a VMware partner based in Nanuet, N.Y. “This is where the enhanced workflows come in. IT teams see many of the same issues that come across whether it’s 100 endpoints or 1,000. Eighty-percent of the time, it’s a common issue where there’s a set fix for it. By leveraging the workflows, you can assign engineers and guide them to resolution at a much faster rate to meet customer SLA’s.”

Matt Kozloski, vice president of professional services at VMware partner Winslow Technology Group, headquartered in Waltham, Mass., called the new features a “win-win” for his business.

“User experience monitoring and management has long been a blind-spot for environments, though it represents a considerable burden of time and effort to support,” he told CRN on Monday. “That results in wasted software and hardware resources, unproductive troubleshooting, and an inefficient, unproductive user experience. VMware DEX is a win-win for customers and partners.”

Kozoloski said in the past, he had tried using similar products, however most were created as bolt-ons, rather than integrated into VMware, leaving customers reluctant to adopt them. The new features give VMware customers an unparalleled view of their environment.

For example, he said VMware enhanced Horizon with the “help desk tool,” which is now fully integrated into the product. He said that provides incredibly deep visibility into what’s going on, during a VDI session – in addition to finding data like what VDI VM is a user actively connected to.

“That was huge for Horizon environments to dramatically enhance support – I see this as the next major release of that,” Kozoloski wrote via email. “Imagine a rural customer with a bunch of rural end-users, how do you know if their lousy 5G connection is the problem versus a problem on the configuration or environment? That could determine that Nvidia GPUs are appropriate, not for CAD/CAM applications but for offloaded/hardware encoding (super high compression), vs. just having them deal with it or constantly getting calls for a bad experience or throwing random (and expensive) other hardware at the problem.”

Digital Employee Experience Management -- what VMware calls DEEM -- for Windows devices managed by 3rd party solutions makes VMware’s intelligent Hub, DEEM, and Assist, along with the entire DEX offering is now available for those devices.

DEEM for VMware Horizon can measure and analyze end-user experiences using Horizon virtual apps and desktops which merge network performance, log-on time, and VM performance, VMware said.

The company’s Guided RCA, meanwhile, uses AI to identify the likely cause of an issue then assigns that issue a confidence score. VMware has integrated automation workflows that can take the appropriate remedial action, which scales a help-desk’s ticket resolution capability, and make proactive employee notifications.