The Office Has Escaped the Office

Somewhere in a supermarket, a handheld scanner is working inside a freezer at minus 18 degrees Celsius. It has an unromantic job: help someone find a product, record a movement, keep an order on track. If it fails, a shopper may wait and a colleague may lose time. ASDA, the British retailer, has tens of thousands of these devices. Its story is a useful way to understand VMware Workspace ONE, because a scanner in a freezer is a much sterner critic of enterprise software than a conference audience.

ASDA had to separate its technology from Walmart’s after the retailer changed ownership. That meant rebuilding thousands of systems while shops kept opening every morning. Its handheld estate alone numbered 55,000. A platform migration might have offered a clean slate. It would also have required staff to relearn a tool while the operation was already changing beneath them. ASDA evaluated its options and stayed with Workspace ONE. Its lead engineer, Max Parker, says teams could migrate as many as 180 devices at a site in one night, at several sites in parallel.

That is the appeal of this category of software. The promise is not that workers will admire an endpoint console. They should scarcely notice it. A new scanner boots, takes the right configuration and apps, and can be repaired remotely when something goes wrong. ASDA also uses Workspace ONE Launcher to show a role-specific set of apps and Assist to troubleshoot shared devices. Its dashboards track such prosaic matters as app versions and battery health. In a store, prosaic is praise.

The billion-dollar ingredient

The name on the product has moved more often than some of the devices it manages. AirWatch grew out of Wandering WiFi, a business founded in 2003 by John Marshall. Alan Dabbiere became its co-founder and chairman. VMware announced in January 2014 that it would buy AirWatch for about $1.54 billion, counting cash, installment payments and assumed equity. It was a large bet on a simple observation: phones and tablets had entered work faster than old desktop management could follow.

VMware introduced Workspace ONE in February 2016. It combined AirWatch’s enterprise mobility management with identity and application delivery. The initial claim was that a worker should see one place to get apps, while IT could set rules for the device and the person behind it. That sounds obvious now. At the time, companies often bought these capabilities separately and then hired people to make the pieces talk to one another. Workspace ONE was the attempt to sell the conversation as a product.

The ownership story took another turn in 2024. Broadcom had acquired VMware, then sold its end-user computing business to KKR for roughly $4 billion. The business emerged as Omnissa, with Workspace ONE and Horizon among its products. Omnissa said at launch that it had 26,000 customers and $1.5 billion in annual recurring revenue. Those are figures for the whole Omnissa business, not a count or revenue line for Workspace ONE alone. The older VMware name survives in links, search results and customer memory; the current product pages belong to Omnissa.

“Maintaining operational continuity during such a massive separation was critical.”Max Parker / ASDA

What the product actually does

Workspace ONE UEM is the administrative center. It enrolls devices, pushes settings and apps, checks compliance, and helps retire hardware without leaving company data behind. Its supported list stretches across iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, ChromeOS and Linux, as well as rugged and specialty devices. Intelligent Hub is the employee-facing side: a place to find apps, notifications, support and, when configured, single sign-on. Omnissa Access supplies identity and conditional access. Assist supplies remote help. Intelligence gathers telemetry and can trigger workflows. None of these pieces magically works on its own; the point is that they are designed to share context.

This matters most where a fleet is varied. A hospital can have shared tablets, clinician phones and virtual desktops; a retailer has scanners, kiosks and office laptops. Asahi General Hospital in Japan uses Workspace ONE alongside Apple’s automated device enrollment and Omnissa Horizon to support clinical work. Its iOS devices carry internal calls, nurse call, electronic medical record access and other applications. In such places, device policy is part of service delivery. A login failure is a work interruption with a person at the other end.

Omnissa sells the product through subscriptions, with per-device and per-user options. Its published Mobile Essentials price is $3 per device or $5.40 per user monthly; UEM Essentials is $5.25 per device or $9.45 per user. These are listed monthly equivalents for a 12-month prepaid term, and richer editions cost more. Per-user licensing can cover up to five devices per person. A shared scanner and a consultant with a phone, laptop and tablet are therefore different buying problems, even if the management console is the same.

The useful question is what you already own

Workspace ONE competes with Microsoft Intune, Ivanti, IBM MaaS360 and, in Apple-heavy estates, Jamf. A business deep in Microsoft 365 may already have Intune entitlements. One with mostly Macs may prefer a specialist. Omnissa’s best case is a messy, mixed environment where managing non-Windows devices, shared frontline hardware, identity and support through one system saves work. Its breadth can also mean more configuration, licensing choices and integration decisions. A small, uniform fleet has less to consolidate.

The practical lesson is to start with a stubborn device, not a slide promising a digital workplace. List the apps it needs, the identity checks it must pass, the failure that stops work and the person who fixes it. Then measure provisioning time, failed updates, help desk calls and device downtime. ASDA’s experience suggests why that test matters: the team valued existing skill as much as a fresh feature list. During a large migration, familiarity was a form of capacity.

Omnissa keeps widening the platform. Its 2025 announcements added plans for Windows Server management, new Apple support and frontline device integrations; in 2026 it made its Omni assistant generally available across several products. Some capabilities depend on edition or rollout status. The old ambition remains recognizable: make the device an invisible route to work. The scanner in the freezer offers the verdict. If it comes on, finds its apps and survives a bad day, nobody writes a thank-you note. The order gets filled.