The Future of Hybrid Work: A New Strategic Partnership with VMware

​​I’m thrilled to announce today that BetterCloud and VMware have formed a strategic partnership to reimagine the digital workplace by unifying Employee Experience, Security and Automation to empower today’s anywhere workforce.

VMware is introducing a new offering called VMware SaaS App Management by BetterCloud via an OEM partnership with BetterCloud, the leader in the SaaS Management Platform industry. This new solution provides a new holistic management and security platform that goes beyond on-premises, desktop and mobile apps to provide targeted support for SaaS applications.

​​Beginning today, VMware sellers can offer BetterCloud’s SaaS Management Platform (SMP) as an add-on to Workspace ONE and Horizon. VMware SaaS App Management is part of the Anywhere Workspace solution, helping customers improve employee experience, embrace zero trust and automate the workspace.

VMware’s SVP and GM of end user computing (EUC) Shankar Iyer and BetterCloud’s CEO David Politis announced this exciting partnership today at VMworld:

This announcement is especially exciting because BetterCloud and VMware are both championing the same cause: supporting more secure, productive workspaces for employees working anywhere. However, achieving this goal is easier said than done as customers struggle with perimeter-based security and management constructs. 

VMware is bringing this vision to reality through VMware Anywhere Workspace—an integrated solution featuring cloud-native endpoint management, endpoint protection, secure access service edge technologies (SASE) technologies and now SaaS app management. Anywhere Workspace provides distributed workforces with a better and more secure experience and gives the IT teams the ability to automate many of their most tedious and routine processes.

Why VMware chose BetterCloud

VMware’s key strategic initiatives are SaaS Transformation, Multi-Cloud and Intrinsic Security, and they’ve continued to add value with both organic and inorganic technologies in pursuit of this mission. Today it’s clear organizations are massively investing in SaaS. However, those investments are wastefully underperforming if users can’t be up and running with their SaaS apps on Day 1. IT can’t effectively manage the growing complexity and variety of SaaS app policies, as data leakage and overall SaaS app posture and configuration have become massive challenges. To address these problems, VMware evaluated the SaaS Management Platforms industry to offer a holistic app management platform that goes beyond Windows and mobile apps to extend user lifecycle management and data security to SaaS applications.

Over the past 10 years, BetterCloud has pioneered the SaaSOps movement, practice and category. According to G2, BetterCloud is the leader in SaaS Operations Management and according to Gartner, BetterCloud is the SaaS Management Platform (SMP) vendor that offers the most comprehensive SaaS discovery, management and security capabilities in a single platform. Forrester has identified BetterCloud as the largest purpose-built SaaSOps vendor, which comes as no surprise as BetterCloud has thousands of customers across the globe with 8.5 million SaaS users actively being managed by its platform everyday.

VMware and BetterCloud share a unique philosophy and vision that organizations can elevate both employee experience and security with zero touch automation. We also have heard from technology decision makers about their top three concerns: security, ease of use and ease of management. This translates to the three core pillars of our combined product vision: Employee Experience, Intrinsic Security and Zero Touch Automation.

Employee Experience

An SMP like BetterCloud improves employee experience by proactively ensuring employees have access to all SaaS apps and resources required to perform their job. This means first obtaining full visibility of all apps used across an organization​, then identifying app redundancy, understanding license utilization, and taking corrective actions to rightsize SaaS spend. It also means being able to automatically fulfill self-service requests from employees asking not only to access, but also completely configure their desired SaaS apps to become instantly productive.

This is about accomplishing the ease-of-use demand—removing everyday friction for employee productivity, and reaping the benefits of enabling employees to work smarter and better in today’s digital workplaces.

Intrinsic Security

IT teams seek to establish policies protecting corporate assets within their SaaS estate, avoid accidental data breaches, and mitigate insider threats. They want to achieve simpler, faster, and smarter security with automated remediation workflows.

BetterCloud’s SMP empowers IT to assign the right level of access to avoid accidental data breaches and protect against insider threats​. It further mitigates security risks by setting up guardrails for user activity​ and delivers least privilege access to keep corporate assets secure.

Together we believe it’s critical to have flexibility and precision when better securing users’ applications and data anywhere, and strike the right balance for an organization’s unique business needs. You no longer must sacrifice better security or employee productivity. As an add-on to VMware Workspace ONE portfolio, BetterCloud puts user experiences at the forefront while enabling stronger security for today’s distributed workforce.

Zero Touch Automation

We’re working together to reduce manual, error-prone, tedious tasks and simplify management across users, devices and apps anywhere in today’s digital workplace. 

BetterCloud’s SMP enables IT to automate manual, day-to-day SaaS app admin tasks such as onboarding, offboarding, configuration changes and more. ​With a fully customizable, zero-code workflow platform built with patented operational intelligence, 70 out-of-the-box SaaS integrations, and 1,000+ included SaaS admin actions, BetterCloud speeds IT modernization efforts by fully automating processes with zero touch.

For organizations, this ultimately increases IT responsiveness and efficiency while breaking down silos, lowering IT complexity and total cost of ownership.

A partnership years in the making

The foundation of this relationship was laid by growing industry and analyst acknowledgement over the last several years that SaaS management platforms complement unified endpoint management and identity management solutions. This validated what we at BetterCloud had been hearing directly from customers for years since our inception in 2011: MDM Tamed the Explosion of Mobile Devices. But What About SaaS?

In 2019, BetterCloud launched its Integration Center and released its first integration with VMware Workspace One as one among 32 SaaS integrations.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift to remote work, and SaaSOps became more relevant than ever. We found the topic of SaaSOps, and the capabilities that BetterCloud offers, became top of mind for many IT leaders. In May 2020, Warburg Pincus led a $75M investment in BetterCloud to supercharge the SaaSOps movement.

Thereafter, VMware’s product and IT teams witnessed how BetterCloud can be the brocade stitching together everything that makes SaaS adoption successful. In a time when IT is increasingly tasked to do more with less, we help make that possible. Our customers began seeing BetterCloud’s value build and compound, especially as they automate SaaS use cases like offboarding, file security, least privileged access and managing overall SaaS sprawl.

In April 2021, VMware launched Anywhere Workspace to address the way businesses have embraced a distributed workforce and flexible work options in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Addressing the challenges of this distributed workforce requires a modern, integrated approach. VMware Anywhere Workspace brings together the innovative technologies of VMware Workspace ONE, VMware SASE and VMware Carbon Black Cloud, empowering anywhere organizations to manage multi-modal employee experience, better secure the distributed edge and automate the workspace:

I am personally in awe of and respect VMware’s bold vision. Very few companies have gained the trust, adoration, and innovation expectations of IT teams like VMware has. Having personally worked in related networking, cloud identity and security companies in my career, I can attest that no other vendor is tackling this problem for today’s workforce like they are. 

We are proud and excited to partner with VMware to make our shared vision a reality!

Our integrated vision for the future of hybrid work

We are extremely excited about our shared vision for the future: to put applications and their data at the forefront for a built-in, context-aware, unified security solution. 

As organizations rapidly move forward with their digital transformation, we believe security should be intrinsic to applications and their data, and be built into the environment that needs protection, rather than applied as a layer on top. In addition, security solutions should use contextual information to help prevent attacks. And they should help simplify management, unifying administrative tools and bringing together disparate security teams.

To fuel this vision, our long-term strategy is to fully integrate both companies’ platforms across BetterCloud’s Discover, Manage and Secure capabilities and VMware’s Workspace ONE Intelligence, UEM, Access and Hub services. 

To learn more about VMware SaaS App Management and our partnership, watch this on-demand session at VMworld and hear directly from VMware and BetterCloud product leaders! 

You can also request VMware for a free assessment of your SaaS environment to discover the full scope of SaaS applications in your environment and uncover opportunities for savings on license costs with a free personalized report!