CrowdStrike Fal.Con 2024 | Bharath Rangarajan | Omnissa

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Bharath Rangarajan

Chief Product Officer

Omnissa

Omnissa splits off from VMware with a focus on the end-user experience

Since the pandemic spurred a transition from the office to the home, endpoint management has become a crucial area for cybersecurity.Omnissa LLC emerged as an independent company after Broadcom acquired VMware, with a pure play focus on end-user computing under a unified digital platform. It aims to address ongoing security and workflow concerns for work-from-home employees.Omnissa’s Bharath Rangarajan talks about connecting with end-users in hybrid workplaces

play_circle_outline Omnissa's background and independence post-Broadcom acquisition

play_circle_outline Partnership with CrowdStrike for endpoint security

play_circle_outline Product roadmap: multi-cloud, application delivery, endpoint management, security, digital employee experience

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Bharath Rangarajan | Omnissa

Bharath Rangarajan

Chief Product Officer Omnissa

Bharath Rangarajan, chief product officer at Omnissa, discusses the company's focus on end-user computing. Omnissa, now an independent company, offers desktop virtualization and unified endpoint management. With a customer base of 26,000, Omnissa tailors solutions to various industries and user personas, recognizing the shift towards remote work. The company's innovation strategy aims to provide a seamless, smart, and secure workplace. Partnering with CrowdStrike for endpoint security, Omnissa seeks to blend security and management capabilities. They are adop... Read more

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What is the timeline of events leading up to the creation of Omnissa following the Broadcom acquisition of VMware? add

What is the relationship and evolution between the company and CrowdStrike in terms of endpoint security? add

What are the four key product lines that the company is focusing on, and what are some of the areas of growth within those product lines? add

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Bharath Rangarajan | Omnissa

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>> Hello everyone and welcome back. We are here day two live at Fal.Con 2024 in Las Vegas at the Aria. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, co-analyst, Dave Vellante. We are joined by Bharath Rangarajan. He's the chief product officer at Omnissa. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE.

>> Thank you for having me. Great to be here.

>> And you have brought a little bit of swag from your company. We got to point it out.

>> Yeah, we'll be talking about it. Omnissa is the name of the new company that I'm part of.

>> Yeah, so it's now an independent company as of July 1st. Tell us a little bit about the background for our viewers who are unfamiliar.

>> Absolutely. Happy to, Rebecca. So just a little bit of catching up everyone who's not been familiar with all what's happened. So in 2022, Broadcom announced the intent to acquire VMware. So Omnissa used to be the end-user computing business unit as part of VMware. It's one of the three or four biggest business units within VMware. Then post the Broadcom acquisition closing of VMware, in end of around November 2023, KKR, there was a process. Broadcom wanted to spin out the EUC business and fast-forward to February, KKR announced the definitive agreement to acquire the end-user computing business and spin it out as Omnissa and Omnissa was formally launched on July 1st of this year. So it's exciting times and a beautiful new beginning.

>> And you're a pure play in that business, correct? Are you a pure play in that business?

>> Yes, absolutely. So end-user computing essentially to give some perspective on that, had two key product offerings. One was our desktop virtualization, which was built on the vSphere franchise, now expanding to multi-cloud. And then the second one was unified endpoint management, which we started with mobility and then expanding to endpoint management. So those two continue and we have added new solutions, but we are a pure play focused on end-user computing.

>> Which is needed in the business, because there are a lot of companies are sort of, Microsoft's got a business there, but it's part of the whole conglomerate, really not focused on that. So what's the innovation strategy?

>> Yeah, absolutely. I think to touch a point, the focus, especially if you think about it day post-2020, when we all started working in weird work styles like, okay, am I in the office? Am I outside? I think the need for something like a focused effort towards end-user computing became extremely important because few things have changed. The digital entropy as we call it, has changed because it's not just about these new devices we see, new apps, new security tools, new kind of operating systems coming on play, new kinds of devices, and now new AI tools. If you think about all of this, you need a method to this madness to manage all of this stuff. The second aspect is it's not just about employee expectations. People took their laptops, went home and connected it to their local Wi-Fi and said like, you know what? I need a brilliant experience, IT go make it happen. That was the expectation. And then the CFOs came on board and said, well, it's great and wonderful service, IT, you helping do this, but I want you to do it at a lower budget. So financial expectations only got harder and not to mention the information security or the InfoSec expectations. So to manage all of this, the expectations went out. And then the third aspect of this is the exposure. Now, every device, every location we work with, every app we download is a potential threat surface. Now, that's the theme of this conference, but that's the third dimension of end user computing. Now we had to look at a digital workspace from the context and vantage point of all of these three things. And therein lies the innovation. We try to bring all of this together. How do we bring management, security, employee experience? You can't think of those in the traditional silos. And as you pointed out, it can't be like, you know what, I'm buying this bundle from this vendor X, Y, and Z, let me also get this fries on the side. No, that approach is not going to work. You got to think about this in a unified way, in a unified digital platform and that's our innovation strategy.

>> So how closely, I mean, you bring up these excellent points about post-pandemic, which has ushered in this rise of remote work and new employee expectations about having more flexible workplaces, but that has also dramatically changed how organizations manage their technology systems. So how do you talk to your clients about this? Because it is these very sensitive topics that encompass so much about, as you say, the entirety of the employee experience.

>> It's a great question. So I think what we are also finding is the good news for Omnissa as we formed this, as we become a separate company. It's not like we're a startup where we had to go engage in new customer conversations. We have 26,000 blue chip customers, large ones of different scale and several different use cases that we talk to. And so the nature of the conversation in some senses varies from industry to industry too. If we go talk to a healthcare customer, they've got to think about the clinician workforce, doctors and nurses one way versus the back office versus their operational staff versus the people, the scientists and others that may work in that. So we take a very persona-based approach in terms of, hey, this is the... And you talk about retail, I was just talking to a large retail customers today, frontline is a big workforce. They've got hundreds of thousands of employees in the frontline. That workforce didn't have like, oh, I'm going to work from home on Fridays. For them it's seven days a week or five days a week. So you've got to think about the work style and design. So now new devices have come into play. A classic example I'll use is one of the hospitals post-pandemic has gone from this really large clunky equipment that nurses have to move to something like a handheld device that does the same measuring and monitoring. So it's not only just operationally efficient, it's also ergonomic. It's better for the employee and it's also more secure. So these are the strategies companies are taking. The other one of the knowledge worker space is a balance between providing choice. I mean, you both are using Macs.

>> I got three Dell laptops too.

>> Dell laptops and a Mac. So they want to provide choice, some folks want to use iPad. Now how do you provide choice without it becoming the wild, wild west and have some level of control both from an operational perspective as well as security perspective? So these are all the parameters that we work with our customers to figure out what's the right strategy. And it's often ties down to the persona of the user.

>> So it makes sense that you're partnering with a company that specializes in endpoint security. What's the relationship with CrowdStrike? How did it evolve?

>> So I think a lot of it starts looking at what the customer does and working backwards. So I think what's emerging in our... So we are here largely to understand what's going on in the security space because when we think about the digital work platform, our mantra is, how do we provide a seamless, smart, and secure workplace? So secure is kind of embedded in our core vision. So obviously this is one venue where we come in and look at all security practices at play. Another trend we are seeing is we sell into the IT teams, but guess what? Today, IT and security teams by definition have to work very closely. It can't be like, oh, I'm sitting in an ivory tower finding out all these vulnerabilities and then it's your problem to go fix it. They have to go come together. So a lot of our need to be here and our discussions with CrowdStrike is based on what we can do together for our customers on any endpoint and also consuming data. So CrowdStrike has a lot of interesting data that exists, and so we have our data platform that can bring in, and so essentially building workflows that bring together security and management.

>> So speaking of working backwards reminds me, during the pandemic, we were all COVID experts overnight. I used to track very closely the work from home expectations and at the time, and I still think it's true, I had said a lot of this is permanent, maybe not as permanent as I perhaps thought. When you see-

>> Amazon.

>> Andy Jassy, working backwards, that's why I brought that up. Changing, okay, we're going to be in the office five days a week now. Wow, I thought four. Okay, great. Give some to it. And that's a generational and cultural thing. What do you make of that and what are the trends you're seeing across industries?

>> Yeah, again, again, like you said, there's an industry trend and depending on the persona, like frontline workers, there's not much of a choice, you're going. So when you talk about knowledge workers, which is where this big debate is, because they have the flexibility of going anywhere from zero days a week in the office to five days in the week. So a lot of it has to do with the culture and the practical reality of the company. So I think, I can't necessarily comment on one person's approach, but my fundamental belief is that the return to office should be more of what I'd like to call a magnet, not a mandate in the sense that you have to create that the need, it can't be something because just because it's in the rule book. So we are taking a hybrid approach. So I'll speak for Omnissa. We are taking a three days of work if you are within this parameter. So we have very specific parameters in terms of if you live within this many miles or this many minutes globally speaking and there is a big office, then you come into work three days a week. You are flexible in terms of the hours you pick or the days you pick with your manager. So part of it is understanding what our culture is and staying true to it. So we strongly believe that face-to-face interactions are needed and we have to encourage it. The second part of it is that we want to create incentives and encouragement for people to come in and not because the CEO said so or something like that for that matter. So those are the parameters that we are using and be transparent and be fair. The other big part is you can say, you know what? In the US this works, in Germany this works. You're going to have a global policy, yes, with some tweaks based on local labor loss. So I think fairness and transparency is also an important part of doing this properly.

>> But to your point, Taco Tuesday has to mean more than some fun food. It's got to be some kind of collaboration.

>> Absolutely. People come into work and then there is this magical one whiteboard discussion for five minutes when somebody scribbles in and then it starts off and then people say like, boy, that was well worth the one hour drive I took, because we could have never simulated that experience over a Zoom call or-

>> As opposed to, "Oh, I badged in today." Exactly.

>> Well, this is exactly what I'm sure you're familiar with the work of Nick Bloom at Stanford who talks about that hybrid really is the magic. If you can make that work because that is, as you said, where you get the collaboration, but also where you can have the flexibility to do some more concentrated work at home. Speaking of culture, because as you said, a lot of these questions are about company culture, how do you as a product leader in your organization cultivate a culture of innovation? Because that is something that is so critical in this.

>> Yeah, absolutely. I think a few things. I'm a big believer in the fail fast approach in the sense that a bias to action fail fast. A lot of these things tie to the same thing because in the software industry, which is where Omnissa is part of, we tend to redefine things far too quickly. If you look at AI, it's redefining Moore's law. Moore's Law, we thought like two years computing power doubling was big. Think again, NVIDIA and others are doing it in six months now or probably less. So if we think about the reality of the changing landscape, this notion of failing fast is important. And so that's a culture that, so my philosophy is that if the team succeeds, it's the team's accolades. If the team fails, it's my responsibility. So there's a bit of ownership as well. The only way you create the risk, otherwise people are going to be sitting behind there, "Hey, I'm not going to do this." So I think that's extremely important. The second part is in a company even as large as Omnissa. We are only 4,000 people, but still there are bureaucracies and processes. So leadership has to help be the ones that breaks the barrier and say, hey, breaks the tie-break, and you have to make the hard decisions. So you need a framework wherein you're not afraid to make the hard decisions. And I also believe in a framework where we have trust that I would love to have more than 90% of the decisions being made at the leaf node where the individual contributors are making more decisions and only the real hard ones are floating up to the top. You don't want a command and control culture. So that's a second part of what we need for innovation. And then you need a few strategic thinkers who can think beyond the bend, and certainly I build that bend strength as well in the team. So you need thinkers and operators. You don't need just a bunch of thinkers and a bunch of operators. You need a good mix of this. So these are all the strategies we have adopted to bring together a culture of innovation.

>> My last question, roadmap. CPO, what's ahead on the roadmap product-wise?

>> So I think when you look at, I'll take it from product line by product line. So we've got four key product lines. The first one is our desktop virtualization. So it's essentially running virtual desktops. And so that business is a staple. And so there are three areas of growth. One is multi-cloud. Hey, we used to be a vSphere shop, now we run on Azure, we run on AWS, but the number of clouds are just growing, so expand there. And the second piece of that is also application delivery. So we want to find new and better ways of application management. Now moving to endpoint management, boy, a lot is going on there. So the number of endpoints we manage, so it's world started off with iOS and Windows, then Android came on, then Mac came on. But the number of endpoints, now we have to think about Linux. Now we have got to think about AR, VR devices. We have got to think about how do we manage servers potentially this way as well. So the number of endpoints we manage is changing. The second thing customers are asking us to do is workflows. Endpoint management cannot just be about policies input. I want to have a great employee onboarding workflow. That end of the day becomes an endpoint management problem. So we are now up-leveling the stack to focus on workflows. Now, the third pillar is security and compliance. The first two product lines I talked about already address a lot of security use cases. But what we want to focus on going forward is what we call is continuous conditional access. Essentially, continuously evaluate the posture of our devices and based on that control access to important resources in the company. Second, we also want to focus on stronger endpoint hygiene. We strongly believe that prevention is better than cure. End of the threat actors will be there, but if we have a solid security architecture and baseline, we can prevent it. So that's part of the roadmap. And the fourth pillar for us is digital employee experience. And this is the fastest growing market for us in the end, user computing wherein use a lot of AI and machine learning to almost eliminate the need for a help desk ticket. Think about a world where I don't have to file a help desk ticket. So that's part of our roadmap too.

>> So will the AI PC trend, assuming it's coming, will it fatten up your endpoints?

>> To some extent, the NPUs, I mean, people are working on ways of bringing it down, but like anything else you'll see a little bit of beefing up on the end point. This happened in the security world already. We started putting a ton of agents in the beginning. Now rationalization is happening. AI will go through. But my key point that is it's about focusing on the right problems and focusing on what needs to be done at the end point and what needs to be done in the cloud. I think that once you get the balance, the end point will be fine.

>> Bharath, I'm imagining a world where I don't have to file a help desk ticket. So thank you very much for that.

>> Absolutely.

>> I'm going to dream big. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE.

>> Thank you for having me. It's great. Good being here.

>> Great to have you.

>> Thank you.

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. Keep it right here on theCUBE. We'll be back with more of Fal.Con 2024. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech, news, and analysis.