‘We have a path to double and triple the company in the next few years,’ Omnissa CEO Shankar Iyer said.
Omnissa CEO Shankar Iyer sees the firm’s revamped partner program making “a material and significant contribution to the growth of our company” as the former VMware end-user computing business marks one year since its separation and invests in product innovation–with an eye on potential acquisitions down the road.
“We believe that partners are essential to the space,” Iyer told CRN in an interview. “As part of the Omnissa Partner Program, we are putting skin in the game and actually training these partners. We didn’t have an opportunity to do it at this level at VMware.”
The Mountain View, Calif.-based digital work and end-user computing (EUC) platform vendor became independent of VMware and VMware parent Broadcom in July after investment firm KKR bought the business for about $4 billion. It is on target to hit more than $1.5 billion in annual recurring revenue this year, Iyer said.
[RELATED: Omnissa, The Former VMware EUC Business, Launches New Partner Program]
Omnissa Partner Program
Omnissa serves seven of the top 10 Fortune 500 companies, including more than 15 defense organizations worldwide, nine of the 10 global airlines and eight of the 10 largest global banks, according to the vendor. It takes in insights from insights from 50 million devices worldwide and has seen a sustained increase in customers spending more than $1 million annually.
The vendor has invested in improving its platform as well as more partnerships and integrations beyond the products offered by its former parent VMware.
Recent product innovations include a new onboarding deployment option for Windows devices, Horizon Cloud availability on Amazon WorkSpaces Core, a Microsoft Edge for Business connector for Omnissa Access and a security events service for sharing continuous real-time Omnissa device compliance state change events.
Iyer said that he sees opportunities to acquire companies to boost Omnissa capabilities in security and experience, but the company is not in a rush to make purchases.
“Inorganic is definitely in the cards,” he said. “We have a path to double and triple the company in the next few years. Most of it will be organic. Some of it could be inorganic.”
Shad Williams, global EUC practice manager for the Global Solutions & Architecture group in Maryland Heights, Mo.-based Omnissa partner World Wide Technology–No. 9 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500–told CRN in an interview that customers have asked for years for Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) support with the Horizon virtual desktop delivery product Omnissa inherited when it left VMware, a partnership announced after the sale.
“There’s a degree of excitement on where this is going to go,” he said.
WWT has seen a flurry of customers looking to Omnissa and other companies for alternatives to VMware and Citrix after both companies were acquired and changed their pricing models, Williams said.
“That has caused a lot of people to start taking a look at their environments and generally reassess the state of what they’re doing in end-user computing in general and in desktop and app virtualization specifically,” Williams said.
By 2026, about half of digital workplace leaders will have established digital employee experience (DEX) strategies and tools, up from 30 percent in 2024, according to Gartner.
Here’s more of what Iyer had to say to CRN on the vendor’s work with the channel and future product innovation.
One year into Omnissa’s time as an independent company–what do you want partners to know?
Pretty quickly, we’ve established ourselves as the leader in digital workspace, which is essentially a collection of solutions that drive the end-user computing estate of most enterprises, driven by three separate solutions combined together in a singular platform called the Omnissa platform.
The three specific solutions within that are unified endpoint management, where we can manage and secure devices across pretty much every operating system and every device type in the world.
Virtual desktop infrastructure and desktop-as-a-service, that’s the second big market segment.
The third–which is more recent, in the last five years–is digital employee experience, DEX, and then a whole lot of security features.
Our goal was to deliver a singular, best-of-breed solution across these facets, to allow enterprises to drive three outcomes. One is to manage their end-user computing estate across these devices, applications, information, etcetera, in a holistic fashion. We’re the only really pure play vendor that combines all these solutions together.
These solutions also protect the end-user computing estate. So we play a significant role in security.
We work with cybersecurity vendors like the EDR (endpoint detection and response) vendors like CrowdStrike or SentinelOne or so on and the cloud security vendors like Palo Alto (Networks and) Zscaler.
But we integrate with them to provide a holistic security solution. We’re a very important aspect of the security solution for most enterprises because we provide security hygiene and compliance.
And the third is to really drive employee experience and measure and monitor it with the ability to remediate and fix it in almost an autonomous way, which lowers help desk costs for enterprises.
We’re a necessary ingredient of the technology stack for most companies. We believe we’re the only ones that do it holistically and, probably, at the greatest scale.
Over the last year, we’ve consolidated our position. We do believe we are the market leader in that space. We believe that we have significant opportunities to grow. We are growing. We’re profitable. We’re on target to hit over ($)1.5 billion ARR (annual recurring revenue) this year.
(Our purpose-specific Omnissa Partner Program launched in March) has gotten off to a great start.
We believe that partners are essential to the space, as they have been.
The difference with our program is it was tailored to this space.
We expect it to make a material and significant contribution to the growth of our company.
Why is the channel so valuable for Omnissa?
We have about a 26,000-strong customer base. I would say, other than maybe really little companies, most customers need this quality of end-user computing solutions.
We can’t reach all of them. We need to expand the TASM (total addressable market).
The second and perhaps more important thing is the value-added services our partners can add.
The world is trending more and more to MSP offerings. … They can help the customer manage the service, monitor it, track it. And then provide support and service desks to these solutions, as many of these service providers do.
Value-added resellers and … the solution resellers are really important to us.
There are things where sometimes you need to take our technology and integrate it with other security solutions.
As an example, if you use us and CrowdStrike, we actually share signals. Through a combination of the two products, you can get one plus one equals three. That may be a place for our partners to weigh in.
You see this quite a bit in Europe and Asia, but even in the Americas, if you look at companies in health care and so on, they don’t have large IT organizations. They rely on the partner community to be able to acquire, run, manage, service, support all these end-user computing solutions, which is a big aspect of their technology stack.
Finding a partner that has competence in these solutions … is important.
Because we are a platform–we cover the gamut from UEM (unified endpoint management) to VDI to DEX and some security–that actually is good for the customer and good for the partners.
One, the partner can build expertise around this. As part of the Omnissa Partner Program, we are putting skin in the game and actually training these partners. We didn’t have an opportunity to do it at this level at VMware.
The ability for us to really train these partners and get them equipped is huge. That’s been resonating significantly. Many partners have been trained. They’re excited. Not only can they provide architecture solutions and blueprints for customers, but they can service and manage them.
From a customer standpoint, it’s hugely advantageous because when you put all your end-user computing solutions into the Omnissa basket with one or more partners, they are now able to manage that holistically. It reduces costs. It reduces risk.
Do you want to see the ecosystem expand or is the focus going deeper with existing partners?
In our prior incarnation at VMware, we didn’t feel like we had the breadth.
We had depth with a few partners. So if we can get a broad base of partners with depth–and we can put our skin in the game and train them, get them equipped, work with them far more tighter, it benefits them. They appreciate it because they make money. But on the flip side, it helps a customer.
We became independent in July. We took a lot of time structuring the program. We’d actually been in touch with the end-user computing community of partners probably the last two years.
We learned a lot (about) what they needed.
When this partner program came out, I would say the top 20 (percent), 25 (percent) knew exactly what was coming out. The partner program mechanics. The way we’re going to work.
We quickly got all the partners signed up. Order registrations are ramping up.
What are the demand trends you want Omnissa partners focused on?
The world of distributed work is here to stay. Heterogeneity is here to stay.
There are a lot of devices of different types. There are people who are operating in different modalities.
The three factors of cost, risk and user experience are predominant.
You need a UEM solution. You need a VDI solution. You need a DEX solution. You need a security solution.
I can go buy a bunch of different things and bolt it together. With our solution, it’s a no-brainer. We are the best of breed in all these categories.
We are a platform, so it gives them the best economics, the best risk and the best experience.
We are seeing a lot of customers–especially the larger ones that have been using our products–now starting to increasingly consolidate. Maybe they started with us in mobility. Now they’re expanding to desktops, to Windows and Mac.
Maybe they were using a legacy vendor for VDI and now they’re switching to desktop-as-a-service with us on multiple clouds, private and public.
Maybe they are changing cybersecurity strategies. They find our solution coupled with any of the cybersecurity vendors as the best integration. That consolidation is hugely at play.
How is Omnissa evolving in the AI era?
We announced a vision of autonomous workspaces back in ‘22. This was actually at (the annual conference) VMware Explore, right before (text generation tool) ChatGPT came out.
Now that vision is significantly coming to fruition. … The AI capabilities we have in this autonomous workspace, one is what we call insights or alerts. Knowing when some things are not right and you get alerted, and so you act on it.
We just launched a thing called the Omni system. … This is similar to (AI) copilot technology to sit alongside and assess and do root cost analysis, assist (users) in doing things. It could be even sometimes deploying things or figuring out how to troubleshoot things.
And the last (AI capability) is advice. Conversational AI. ‘I have this problem. How do I solve it?’ And to provide that assistance based on data.
It’s very important for partners to understand this because, increasingly, customers want to be able to not get into the nitty gritty of the products, but (instead) be focused on business outcomes.
‘How’s my device estate doing? How many people have been using this modality? Which applications are being logged in most?’ Each of (those measures) tells them different things.
Then what partners do is customize it for that customer and give them answers. So that helps customers cut significant costs out of the business. But more importantly, (it) helps them react more.
It’s not about preventing risk. It’s about reacting to potential risk that’s emerging.
Tell me that, A, there’s a potential risk emerging. Second, help me remediate it or address my posture so the risk is reduced.
How are you continuing to advance Omnissa’s technology?
We’ve been (creating a unified platform) since, actually, about 2018, 2019.
There are a lot of potential things that can be expanded. As an example, we are adding a module … which allows customers to assess which vulnerabilities that showed up on the feeds from yesterday or this week are most impactful to their environment.
And, secondly, what is the best way to sequence the remediations? And how long does that remediation take? And what does my risk profile look like before and after those remediations are addressed?
We’re also starting to do Windows server management.
Is Omnissa interested in acquisitions in the future?
There’s a lot of opportunity for us to do more in the security and experience space through inorganic moves.
I don’t think we’re going to be a company that goes and says, ‘Let’s go get a different market and go and acquire that.’
There’s so much space in this market. We will acquire, potentially, in some cases, small, technology-based acquisitions that help us drive forward in terms of innovation.
Sometimes, (we’ll acquire) bit more established solutions that broaden the market. We’re looking at that closely. But we’re going to do it in a very deliberate fashion.
After the acquisition was announced last February, we started to pour a lot of money into innovations (that) are just starting to come out. Right now, we’re in this organic phase. But yes, inorganic is definitely in the cards.
We’re not sure (about timing) at this point. We are looking. There’s nothing that is pounding, urgent.
These things (can be) opportunistic. We’ve got some ideas framed.
We have a path to double and triple the company in the next few years. Most of it will be organic. Some of it could be inorganic.
Is the economy playing a role in customer interest in vendor consolidation?
Consolidation happens … in waves.
This set of technology is here to stay. … You still have to manage and secure and pay attention to employee experience.
Consolidation is a natural move because it removes complexity, makes it easier to manage, reduces risk, improves experience, scales better.
The data play is important. The more I can collect data in a singular platform, the better it is. I don’t have to start correlating data across multiple systems. And increasingly, more and more businesses are becoming data-driven businesses.
Everything is based on value. So if you can provide significant value, you get paid for it. If you don’t provide value, you don’t.
That’s what partners like about us. We are proven. We’ve been there. We are rock solid. We’ve been proven to be resilient. We’re mission critical. Betting on a platform is a good thing.
We also have a lot of models of ROI (return on investment) and TCO (total cost of ownership) and so on that we share with partners.
As they help their customers plan out the technologies and the value realization, we’ve already done that. We have proof points. So that’s really important in this climate.
(We are seeing growth in net-new customers and going deeper with existing customers). The market is pretty large.
Part of the goal of the partner program is TAM expansion. We’re starting to definitely see that new customer activity, especially from people coming from legacy products or competitive products.
It’s been only three months-plus since the program launched. But so far, the momentum has been good on both fronts.
Is Omnissa growing its employee base and growing in particular markets?
We’re hiring and revamping.
As we get higher and higher up in the stack, we’re starting to hire more people that can build more strategic relationships in the field. So we’re hiring for scale and size.
Our expansion is, quite frankly, across the world. I don’t think there’s any specific areas.
In Europe and Asia, there’s a lot of push towards things like sovereign clouds. So we’re pushing there.
This heterogeneity and diversity of operating systems is huge. And clouds, for that matter. Even within private clouds, there are multiple choices.
(In industry), it’s across the board.
For us, the big industries have been health care, financial services, retail. That has a lot of frontline workers. Government in some places.
We do see strength in logistics, in manufacturing as well.
