‘With the infusion of AI across our platform, with the ability to deliver that value-add, [partners] can engage in a much more relevant and top-of-mind conversation that the CXO, CIO, CEO is having inside of our customers,’ Omnissa CMO Renu Upadhyay tells CRN.
Omnissa CMO Renu Upadhyay sees vendor consolidation in the end-user computing space the vendor serves as a major opportunity for not only her company but its solution providers as well.
Customers are looking to reduce costs and improve remediation and reaction time through fewer EUC tools, and the updates Omnissa revealed this week at its second annual Omnissa One 2025 event put it on another level for serving customers through new agentic artificial intelligence capabilities and broadening the vendor partner ecosystem for greater flexibility, Upadhyay told CRN in an interview.
“Customers are definitely feeling overwhelmed with the patchwork of tools that they have to manage. There’s a tool-overload trend that they’re dealing with, which is creating complexity and cost. And they are asking us to simplify that and help them manage that.”
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Omnissa One 2025
Shad Williams, global EUC practice manager for the Global Solutions and Architecture Group at Maryland Heights, Mo.-based Omnissa partner World Wide Technology—No. 9 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500—told CRN in a recent interview that the vendor’s partner program has been helpful for him and colleagues since Omnissa’s spin-out from VMware.
The separation was completed in July 2024 with the purchase of VMware’s EUC by private equity giant KKR.
Williams and his team have had access to product managers and executive leadership to make sure the solution provider can effectively support customers, he said.
“As long as they continue doing it the way that they’ve been doing it, truly leaning on their partners, realizing that partners are the source of their ultimate scalability and success, they’ll do just fantastically,” he said.
Here’s more of what Omnissa’s CMO shared with CRN on the vendor’s upcoming innovations and how its solution providers can level up in the EUC market.
What’s the biggest news coming out of Omnissa One 2025?
A lot of IT teams are really caught right now between what they see as a patchwork of tools that they have to deal with in the end-user computing space.
When you have a patchwork of solutions and tooling, there’s a lot of heavy manual processing. There’s also a shortage of skills that they talk about. And it makes security a lot more reactive. And we know that’s a big challenge that a lot of them face, especially as the endpoint and the end user expand the threat attack surface.
While they’re managing this patchwork of solutions, how should they facilitate the adoption of AI?
[AI] is here—employees are very likely already using some kind of tool and technology inside of the workplace. [This is how] you make sure that you are part of that new trend that’s happening and make sure that the EUC IT admins can really facilitate that AI adoption and really be in charge of it.
The focus really needs to come back to the human experience.
From an employee perspective, how do we make sure those employees continue to stay productive, to stay secure as they access their technology, their digital tools, across personas, whatever their job may be, and at the same time, continuing to make it much more easier for the end-user IT staff to deploy the tools and the technologies in a much simpler way and adapt to these new trends like AI?
The open ecosystem is a key tenet of our platform strategy because we know organizations already have solutions that they deploy, be it for security or AI or any other areas. So how do we make sure we plug and play with those solutions that they’re bringing into the environment, which also delivers a better TCO for customers?
And then finally, core AI-driven capabilities that we’re weaving in throughout our platform.
What should partners know about the new AI capabilities?
That’s really where the market is going. That’s where customers are taking us. And that’s where we see the maximum opportunity in terms of simplifying both from a complexity and cost perspective for our customers.
We, of course, announced our vision of the autonomous workspace several years ago.
As we started to look toward deploying innovations for that vision, we started to think about how do we embed trust and transparency throughout this. Because with AI, there is fear, so we want to make sure that we are hand-holding and working together with our customers as we do those AI enablements inside of our platform.
We are announcing our AI assistant. We call it Omni. This is an assistant that’s embedded throughout the Omnissa platform. And the goal of this is a conversational interface … really making it easy for the IT admin to do their tasks in a lot more intuitive fashion.
[They have the] ability to check on device status, to check on the deployment status, to check on knowledge base articles and do all of that through this conversational interface.
What they’re experiencing in their personal lives [with AI applications such as ChatGPT], we are now bringing to their professional lives through Omni.
That’s the first announcement that we are very excited to bring to market later this year, from a limited availability fashion.
How about the new AI agentic service?
While we have the capability in our platform—we have automation as a core platform service—and the ability for IT to create these automations, we are now providing the ability to turn these automations or these workflows into agents.
We all know that’s a trend that’s happening in the market, and we want to enable our EUC IT admins to take advantage of this capability so this agentic service becomes an extension of the IT team.
It’s a workflow that an IT team can build and execute on their behalf. And the first area that we are investing in building this agent is in the area of security.
Security is a big pain point … when you have so many tools, a dynamic environment, security is the first to be compromised.
We want to deliver agents that make it easy for IT to stay on top of remediation. … That first service is in the area of vulnerability management.
What should solution providers know about your new partnership with CrowdStrike?
In terms of jobs to be done by IT, a big one comes in the context of making sure the devices are in the desired state. And what that means is patching the devices.
While we do that in a great way on the mobile side, we’re excited to announce our partnership with CrowdStrike.
We are bringing together the threat data that CrowdStrike provides … and then we are bringing that into our platform and then using the capabilities of our platform to cut short the time from finding those vulnerabilities and then remediating them.
If a threat is detected, sometimes it takes up to 30 days to remediate something. Within that time, your entire organization is exposed.
With our solution, we are cutting short that time from when a threat is detected to when a remediation workflow is rolled out. For example, a device can be patched very quickly. It’s connecting and closing the loop with vulnerability defense.
We’ve completely redesigned how we deliver modern management, and this is specifically for Windows.
Modern management is something that was heavily reliant on the … APIs that were exposed by the Windows platform.
We have decoupled from that, and we’ve done this through our Intelligent Hub solution and moved to an agent-based approach.
Anything from pushing updates or patches or life-cycle management software updates … we have now modernized that and delivered it from the cloud.
We can sit side by side or completely eliminate any legacy way of patching devices, keeping devices up to date. They don’t even have to be connected to a VPN. You can just get it over the cloud.
This is huge progress, a complete rearchitecture. And it enables IT admins to reduce that time to keep devices updated or respond to any kind of security threats that may occur in the environment.
How has Omnissa revamped its server management capabilities?
This is in response to a very common request from our customers where, as they standardize on Omnissa, when it comes to management of the Windows endpoint they’ve been asking us about also managing the Windows servers.
We are bringing that entire modern life-cycle management that we do for desktops also to servers. And what this does is really reduce the licensing cost that, today, organizations pay for when they use a traditional PCLM [PC life-cycle management] tool to manage their servers.
Now it’s drastically, orders of magnitude cheaper, to go with this modern approach. You’re also looking at a consolidation in terms of you don’t need multiple tools to do this. You can consolidate onto a single management platform. That makes it a lot easier to deploy security, apply patches and do all of that.
Is there more vendor partner news Omnissa solution providers should know about?
Another big area [Omnissa is expanding into] is Apple same-day support.
We are enabling that capability by leveraging [Microsoft-owned] GitHub, where Apple posts those features. We support that with the same-day support for all of the Apple payloads.
This reduces that cost by consolidating the management—you don’t need yet another tool for your Apple devices separate from your Windows devices. You can now consolidate into one single platform and simplify the management of those endpoints and enable security and productivity for the employee.
We talked earlier this year about our intention to announce support for Nutanix AHV [Acropolis Hypervisor].
That will be available later this year. A lot of our customers who want flexibility, who want choice and have standardized on Nutanix as their platform from a hypervisor perspective, we are now bringing that capability as part of our horizon portfolio.
We are announcing support for [the] Blackwell platform architecture from Nvidia, not just from a Horizon perspective—which makes the deployments a lot more efficient, a lot more cost- effective and a lot more scalable … but we’re also announcing support for the CloudXR [extended reality streaming product] that Nvidia provides.
As applications get built that are very graphics- and video-heavy, [with] the streaming capability that the CloudXR provides we can now extend and connect that through our Workspace One XR hub.
As organizations look to deploy those XR use cases in the organization, they can do so with a much better experience and a lower cost and complexity.
We are also previewing our support for Platform9, continuing to build on the ecosystem of private clouds that we will support.
How do all these updates help your channel partners?
For our partners, it’s this differentiated platform that is delivering true and real value, that our partners can standardize on and really build solutions around.
They, too, can now address a true breadth of use cases and deliver services on top of those use cases, all standardized on a single platform. It also means that they have the flexibility of an open ecosystem. Many of our channel partners work with these ecosystem partners as well, so it gives them a broader range of solutions and technologies that they can bring together and deliver value to customers.
With the infusion of AI across our platform, with the ability to deliver that value-add, they can engage in a much more relevant and top-of-mind conversation that the CXO, CIO, CEO is having inside of our customers.
You’ll see us continue to go deep in each of the platforms of the end-user computing tools that are coming in but also go wide in the breadth of use cases.
You’ll see us continue to bring more of that simplicity through the infusion of AI across our platform to reduce that complexity and manual processes.
Are you seeing a lot of consolidation around Omnissa’s offers from other vendors?
We have customers who are already doing that. One of the big areas is in the area of endpoint management when it comes to Windows.
There are many solutions that they use, on average 15 to 20 for different point pieces, whether it’s patching or pushing out security updates or agents on devices, which make it very complex. You’ll see us consolidate all of that.
So one area is just within a particular platform, the other is across platforms. So customers who have deployed many point tools across different operating systems–—ike Apple, like frontline devices, rugged devices—we see an opportunity to consolidate over there as well.
Customers are definitely feeling overwhelmed with the patchwork of tools that they have to manage. There’s a tool-overload trend that they’re dealing with, which is creating complexity and cost. And they are asking us to simplify that and help them manage that.
They see and hear the value AI brings in terms of automating a lot of tasks but [want to do] it by keeping the IT admin or the human in the loop so they have control over it.
So help us adopt AI and get the benefits of AI while keeping the IT admin and the human in the loop to control and manage. That is another big trend that we are seeing.
Inside our platform, we’ve implemented what we call ‘nutrition labels.’ So at any point in time, we do anything on behalf of the IT admin, we give visibility to the IT admin so they can opt out of that.
How big is the Windows 11 migration opportunity for Omnissa and your partners?
Windows migration is a big one.
If [partners and customers] go the physical device route, how you do it in the most efficient way … [this] is the Windows management capability that I talked about.
If they choose to go the virtual route, then our partnership with partners like IGEL, so the thin- client route … that’s also something that we enable.
Will Omnissa be helpful to partners as they start to manage AI agents for their customers?
We definitely see the trend going toward that, which is why we are launching our own agent first through vulnerability defense.
Following that, we will continue to add more. And we will enable customers to bring their own as well.
As we enable that, [we want] capabilities to ensure that trust and transparency is maintained throughout that process.
Unlike consumer apps, where all data is public data, it’s not the case for enterprises. There’s a lot of privacy and protection around enterprise data. We want to make sure we do that in partnership with our customers. But we do see that as a trend. We do think that’s an opportunity for partners.
Freestyle orchestrator is our orchestration framework that has been core to our platform for some time now. And we have customers doing millions of workflows and automations using that platform.
We already are part of workflow automation, whether it’s patch management, security remediation, experience management.
So this is a very natural next step for us, going from workflow to agents.
