Lenovo Announces Unified Workspace Cloud to Empower Employees in the Digital Workplace

Lenovo today announced Unified Workspace Cloud, a hosted workspace solution, that will be unveiled at the Lenovo Software booth at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Florida, October 16 to 20. Unified Workspace Cloud enables businesses to drive productivity, innovation, and profitability by providing employees with simplified access to their complete portfolio of applications and content via single sign-on, on any device, anytime, anywhere.

Technology Drives Retention and Agility

Businesses and CIOs today are frequently turning to technology policies and tools that help achieve a more flexible, agile and secure working environment in response to challenges related to attracting, engaging and retaining top talent:

• Losses estimated at $30B per year in the US economy resulting from millennial turnover
• 20.8 billion connected devices are forecast to be in use by 2020
• 91% of employees feel more productive working remotely

The proliferation of connected devices and different operating systems adds complexity to business infrastructures. Combined with the shift towards cloud applications and a workforce that increasingly works remotely, these trends are driving the need for “workspace aggregation” tools like Unified Workspace Cloud that enable a simplified, centralized and secure way to deliver apps and content to any device. Gartner predicts that by 2017, 15% of enterprise organizations will have deployed a workspace aggregator, up from one percent in 2013.

Unified Workspace Cloud is a hosted solution built on Lenovo’s on-premise version of Unified Workspace – which currently has over three million seats deployed across 600 customers in both the private and public sectors. The hosted offering allows organizations with constrained IT staff, and limited infrastructure and expertise, to partner with Lenovo in delivering Unified Workspace capabilities to their employees via a single-tenant cloud. Both the on-premise and hosted versions of Unified Workspace provide a simple, secure and cost-effective way for IT to provide single sign-on access to web-based apps, legacy Windows apps, virtual and remote desktop infrastructure, file shares, and cloud storage. Accessed through a web-based, OS-agnostic application, the solution works on any device with no need for the user to access a virtual private network (VPN) client, or install a desktop agent.

Discover Unified Workspace at Gartner Symposium

Building on Gartner’s theme of Think. Act. Lead. 360, Lenovo Software has created a virtual reality experience for Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Florida, that immerses viewers in a vision of the modern workplace. Designed for Oculus Rift and running on Lenovo IdeaCentre Y-series gaming machines, the experience combines 360-degree video and CGI to guide viewers through the evolution of the employee digital experience. Viewers are taken through massive data visualizations of key workforce trends, an interactive arcade style game where users explore the challenges faced by IT, and an in-depth virtual demo and technology deep-dive. Attendees can experience the virtual reality tour at the Lenovo Software booth #425.

According to Sal Patalano, chief revenue officer for Lenovo Software, moving from a culture of controlling how, when and where end users work, to a culture of empowerment is a digital mandate for virtually every business. “Unified Workspace Cloud helps businesses and IT organizations break the status quo,” he said. “The first step is accepting the reality that controlling how your workforce works is tantamount to tying their hands behind their backs. What users can and can’t do with their apps, devices and data is no longer the focus. Empowering users to work seamlessly, in a manner consistent with how they ‘choose” to work, from the location and device of their choice, is no longer a luxury – it’s table stakes!”

Mr. Patalano will be presenting his breakthrough, thought leadership concept titled “Vuja De: All Over Again” to the Gartner audience on October 18th, from 10:30 – 11:15, in the Pelican room at the Walt Disney World Swan. This award-winning presentation outlines how businesses can achieve breakthrough success by looking at challenges in everything from sales and marketing, to operations and recruitment from an entirely new and unique perspective.