What's New: VMware Skyline at VMworld 2020

The first virtual VMworld is in the books and over 100,000 attendees just made history by coming together to learn about the future of Multi-Cloud, Cloud Native Apps, AI, 5G and Security. All from the comfort of their own homes.

Last week, VMware Skyline was featured in the VMworld Multi-Cloud announcements, solution keynotes, Cloud City, Hands on Labs and multiple breakout and Design Studio sessions. Due to strong customer demand, Skyline is still one of the fastest growing cloud services in the VMware portfolio. In the last year, Skyline added 3800 new customers with just shy of 10,000 total customers globally. Since GA in 2018 Skyline has proactively surfaced tens of millions objects with potential issues of which, majority are remediated by customers in a self-service manner. The issue avoidance Skyline provides to customers is helping reduce operational risk, increase productivity and re-focus their time on digital transformation. Customers are excited that Skyline's role is evolving from just proactive support to proactive intelligence that integrates with cloud management, support and success.

Take a peak at the evolution unfolding and how you can harness the power of Skyline in your organization.

Skyline VMworld 2020 Announcements

Skyline brings proactive intelligence to vRealize Cloud Management and VMware Cloud Foundation. 

• Skyline's integration with vRealize Operations Cloud expands proactive issue avoidance, troubleshooting and automated workflows in a unified management and support experience. 
• Skyline is now included in vRealize Cloud Universal subscription and Success 360. It continues to be included with Production and Premier Support subscriptions at no additional cost. 
• With this announcement, all Skyline customers are eligible for a free 30-day trial of vRealize Operations Cloud, accessed through Skyline Advisor. Join the interest list to be first in line for the trial when it goes live later this year: https://www.vmware.com/go/SkylinevROps 
• Skyline will support VMware Cloud Foundation, the industry's leading hybrid cloud platform. Skyline will identify VMware Cloud Foundation management and workload domains, and surface VCF solution-based Proactive Findings.
• VMware Skyline Health Diagnostics enhances your support experience by providing log analysis and recommendations. These upfront recommendations extend the self-service troubleshooting experience and can further reduce your environment’s overall downtime.

For a behind the scenes look at the Skyline announcements listen to the Virtually Speaking Podcast episode below.

Integration with vRealize Cloud Management

Skyline brings proactive intelligence to the vRealize Cloud Management platform. A seamless experience between management and support is a key component to VMware's multi-cloud strategy giving customers the ability to avoid issues, self-serve troubleshoot and receive proactive support when they need it. The new integration between Skyline and vRealize Operations Cloud provides users:

• A Unified Experience - Quickly access proactive insights, troubleshoot and remediate in a single SaaS workflow.
• Issue Avoidance - Avoid more outages and issues by leveraging Skyline and vRealize Operations Cloud analytics together.
• More Automation - View and automate Skyline insights in vRealize Operations Cloud.

Watch the replay of the Skyline and vRealize Operations session here: https://my.vmworld.com/widget/vmware/vmworld2020/catalog/session/1589561993950001usij

VMware Cloud Foundation Support

Skyline proactively supports "the new vSphere", VMware Cloud Foundation (version 4.1 and up) as a solution in addition to vSphere, vSAN, NSX as individual product support. Customers can now connect SDDC Manager to Skyline and receive specific proactive findings for VCF instances in their inventory.

Integration with VMware Customer Connect

Skyline will power proactive notifications inside of VMware's new customer engagement portal, VMware Customer Connect. Customer Connect AI will surface Skyline Proactive Finding summary information, subscribe to notifications and provide a seamless way to hop back into Skyline Advisor to view details and take action.

Watch the replay of the Customer Experience keynote here:

https://my.vmworld.com/widget/vmware/vmworld2020/catalog/session/15959828386770014obg

Skyline Customer Highlights

How IBM and SAP maintains business continuity with Skyline. Customers and partners tell all:

“Skyline is like another VI administrator on our team working behind the scenes to improve cloud infrastructure reliability and security” – Thomas Thimm, IT Technology Principal Consultant at SAP

“Skyline is helping IBM improve the experience for our managed service clients” – Jack Cherkas Enterprise Cyber Security Architect - Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM) at IBM

Watch the replay here. https://my.vmworld.com/widget/vmware/vmworld2020/catalog/session/15868014450540018dww

More customer quotes

“We are counting on Skyline for proactive recommendations. We see a correlation between proactive remediation and reducing the amount of SRs we file with VMware support. We like where Skyline and vRealize are headed as we begin to implement self-driving operations” - Large US Bank

A VMware cloud provider partner opened 25 SR’s with VMware Technical Support in 2019. 22 of them roughly before Skyline was fully deployed around October 2019. There were 3 more cases opened after that in 2019. There are ZERO cases for 2020.

"We've been using VMware Skyline for months and vROPs now for years and was hoping to get more information on how the two can work together to decrease the amount of time I spend troubleshooting issues and looking for issues in our environments." - Anonymous Customer

Customers adopting Skyline during VMworld 2020

44 new customers chose to adopt Skyline last week. Here are a couple that posted about their experience.

Skyline Hands on Lab at VMworld

The Skyline HOL was taken 542 times, which made it the 6th most popular lab at VMworld 2020. Take it for a spin here: https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/evalcenter?p=skyline-hol-20

Conclusion

This concludes a record setting VMworld 2020. The Skyline team had a blast! Please leave feedback and comments below.