Supporting remote collaboration and scale experience

Over the past few months myself and the End User Computing team that work with me have been running fast in helping business ramp up to cope with the changing needs of their workforce. Communicating simultaneously to the many customers who have reached out has been one challenge so I wanted to post on my personal experience learned in the last months and also link to the formal ways VMware can support you. I also want to share with you what VMware has to offer to support your business, securely. Interested?

Firstly, good news. My China team is now looking like heading out of the pandemic crisis – I am so happy for each member of my team and their family. They have returned to work after weeks of lock down. Ruisen Zhang who runs my business there wrote a fabulous email summarising the experience a few weeks back. He summarised his first-hand experience, given the phase the world is in I wanted to share his insight into what businesses faced.

Paraphrasing Ruisen:

"Here I shared some update and our actions in past month. I really hope the situation in your country will never as serious as here. Just share what we have may help you well prepared.

When everyone start home office, it is not smooth at all…"

• ‘On the first day, most of the company's networks went down. Their design can't bear such pressure.
• VPN is not enough. Far from satisfaction, trouble when large scale users enrolled without experience. And it is not secure at all without endpoint management, performance insufficient as well or hard to scale up. Many concerns on customer data leaking as users turn to consumer apps for contacts, communications, ease of use.
• I even hear some company sent group of IT guys back to office, under the risk and packed all PCs on the table, mail them back to employee’s home for home office. Because they worried about BYOD out of control. Especially for some heavy compute work load like 3D design, they can do nothing with their personal PC at home.
• Even for well-prepared companies or ones that had technology like Virtualised Desktop (ed: VDI) in the office the CIO asked for rapid expansion. But still facing the trouble of expansion in short time, because most of VDI on-premise solution are deployed in LAN, not public access allowed or security compliance needs.
• On the media, widely-spread advertisements of remote office related solution, just toooo many, every vendor want a share. So it is very hard to tell what remote office really are, which is the best, for those customer don't have much knowledge, experience of this.
• For those verticals still continue on duty, like healthcare, police, transportation, media, they also really need home office to minimize close contact with each other or to improve communications for people safety.
• The FSI and logistic system already fully digitalised, with mobile payment, cash paper no longer popular, with the concern of infectious transmission.
• There is no solid answer when this remote office mode will back to traditional way, or it will become the new normal after these. If it is, IT is in the challenge of balance short time temp solution between long terms comprehensive solution.'

The above was close to raw comments as they were written by Ruisen and I believe, is now playing out over the world. The last point is particularly interesting, we will all be faced rapid changes of scale and dimension in our business, but will this be a new normal or do we simply treat this as a short term event and walk on by. The VMware CEO, Pat Gelsinger, made the observation (paraphrased again) “This is a Black Swan event...I believe will permanently change the way we work…” and there is certainly evidence of his observation.

For China Ruisen mentioned to me a cloud everywhere mentality, mobile applications usage exploded as people staying at home for long periods used the cloud to talk, order food and even cloud social dinners. He mentioned buying friends home delivery and all getting on line to socialise and even cloud disco! "Most of people are used to the fast pace life, it really make them crazy to stay at home such a long time”. People need people still inherently and it's one aspect to think about as we have your work teams at home to electronically replace “water cooler conversations” and other casual office interactions we take for granted.

As a larger employer in Asia Pacific and Japan I have a responsibility to keep employees safe and help my peer’s in businesses get through this period and back to full strength. For me this is priority one and I would encourage our clients to keep reaching out as you have been. I have learned a lot along with the team on rapid scale of mobile, desktop services, utilising cloud to add capacity and how to onboard all of this while being compliant. In the end keeping employees safe and productive.

VMware has a series of public offers for solutions you can read here but clearly this not a time for commerce but for businesses in our region to support each other. Reach out to myself or my team and we are here.

Pat Gelsinger’s blog:

https://www.vmware.com/company/news/updates/vmware-ceo-on-covid-19.html

VMware BCP Solutions and offers page:

https://www.vmware.com/solutions/business-continuity.html?src=WWW_US_HPH0_BusinessContinuity_SiteLink