VMware And Amazon’s Eero Unveil ‘Incredible’ Work-From-Home Wi-Fi, SASE Offering

‘The challenge today for corporate America is how do you give that in-office experience securely to the end user at home?’ says Robert Keblusek, CTO of Sentinel Technologies. To solve that problem, VMware and Amazon’s Eero unveil plans for a new remote workforce offering.

Just days before Dell Technologies spins off VMware, the virtualization and software star is already tightening its partnership with Amazon by unveiling a new work-from-home offering that ties together VMware’s SASE security with Amazon’s Eero Wi-Fi systems for remote workers in America.

“The challenge today for corporate America is how do you give that in-office experience securely to the end user at home?” said Robert Keblusek, CTO of Downers Grove, Ill.-based Sentinel Technologies, a fast-growing VMware national partner. “If VMware can embed and extend some of their technology like software-defined networking and their SASE services edge into the home—that is fantastic. I hope that more vendors consider doing it so that we could offer the employees a better experience that’s even more secure in protecting the organization, but also enabling the employee to have a great work-from-home experience.”

VMware is collaborating with Eero, an Amazon company, on work-from-home capabilities that will boost remote network connectivity while extending critical security services to devices that are connected to an at-home corporate network. The offering is specifically designed for remote employees in the U.S. and will be delivered by channel partners.

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Although not yet generally available, the offering pairs Eero’s 6 series mesh Wi-Fi systems with VMware’s SASE work-from-home offering. Deploying the VMware and Eero offerings together is aimed at creating a better at-home Wi-Fi experience for employees for cloud networking and cloud security services.

“Home networks are very unpredictable. Some people do a really good job at building a home network; others do a terrible job. So reliability is an issue too,” said Keblusek. “So if we’ve got a high-quality mesh network that has the ability to allow for your normal home users to get great access, but overlaying like a virtual network or overlaying some sort of corporate-standard network that has the safety and security, as well as maybe support and monitoring—that’s incredible and absolutely necessary to enable the hybrid workforce going forward.”

Channel partners will be able to deliver a solution that brings together Eero’s 6 series mesh Wi-Fi systems featuring Wi-Fi 6 with VMware’s cloud-hosted SASE that enables more secure, reliable and efficient connectivity between user traffic from the Eero Wi-Fi network in the home to applications in public cloud and on-premises data centers.

VMware SASE helps deliver operational simplicity leveraging the centralized Orchestrator to drive networking and security policies. IT can configure these policies and push them to all the remote sites powered by Eero Wi-Fi systems.

Eero’s 6 series mesh Wi-Fi systems deliver fast speeds and solid coverage for simultaneous device usage throughout the home so employees “will be able to say goodbye to dead spots in the home” and enjoy strong application performance, said the company. Employers will have the option to offer Eero Pro 6, a tri-band, high-performance mesh Wi-Fi 6 router designed for homes with Gigabit internet connections, or Eero 6, a dual-band mesh Wi-Fi 6 router designed for homes with internet connections up to 500 Mbps.

VMware SASE brings dynamic remediation capabilities when broadband networks experience packet loss, latency and jitter. The offering recognizes over 3,000 applications automatically while also prioritizing business-critical application traffic. The offering handles latency-sensitive, real-time traffic like audio, video, VDI and IoT, providing a low-latency optimal path using a global network of SASE points of presence close to the Eero Wi-Fi users.

“This collaboration brings together two work-from-home technology leaders,” said Craig Connors, vice president and CTO of VMware’s Service Provider and Edge business, in a statement. “We share a common vision to have technology be an enabler of a great remote work experience rather than an obstacle. Our technologies have played a critical role in empowering remote workers everywhere, and we look forward to bringing our capabilities together to deliver a differentiated mesh Wi-Fi solution to our customers.”

Dell is set to spin off VMware on Nov. 1, which will mark the first time VMware will be an independent company since 2004.

“If you think about multi-cloud, what we really are saying is that we want to be the Switzerland of the industry,” said VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram in an recent interview with CRN. “So if you want to be the Switzerland of the industry, then you want to be a stand-alone independent company, and that’s where we are headed. … It will allow partners that previously were competitors of Dell to now look at VMware with new life and say, ‘Hey, we can do strategic things with VMware.’”