VMware partners with eero to improve network connectivity for remote workers

VMware announced it will collaborate with eero on work-from-home capabilities that will boost remote network connectivity while extending critical security services to devices connecting to an at-home corporate network.

Designed for work-from-home employees in the U.S. and delivered by strategic channel partners, the collaboration is designed to pair eero 6 series mesh Wi-Fi systems with VMware SASE Work from Home solution. In addition, as part of this agreement, VMware is announcing eero is a preferred Wi-Fi provider.

“We ask a lot of our home Wi-Fi these days. At any given moment it may be supporting multiple data-intensive tasks: from joining a work video-conference call, to streaming and gaming in 4K, to supporting an online learning environment, and more. When your network is stretched too thin, your work-from-home performance can suffer,” said Sean Harris, vice president of sales and marketing, eero. “Through this collaboration with VMware, we’re able to offer fast, reliable, and more secure Wi-Fi for remote workers.”

Deploying VMware and eero solutions together will enable IT teams to extend a better at-home Wi-Fi experience for their employees, working alongside VMware’s solution to deliver cloud networking and cloud security services. Channel partners will be able to offer customers a solution that brings together:

eero 6 series mesh Wi-Fi systems featuring Wi-Fi 6: Employees need not be limited to working from one location in the home. eero 6 series mesh Wi-Fi systems feature Wi-Fi 6, delivering 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 app performance.

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.

With eero Secure, employees will receive an added layer of security for their home Wi-Fi, including parental controls for safe search, content filters, advanced security preventing access to sites flagged as malicious, ad blocking to protect their privacy and speed up their browsing experience, and now data usage insights to better manage time online.

VMware SASE is a cloud-hosted solution that will help enable more secure, reliable, and efficient connectivity between user traffic from the eero Wi-Fi network in the home to the applications in public cloud, SaaS cloud and on-premises data centers. VMware SASE brings dynamic remediation capabilities when broadband networks experience packet loss, latency, and jitter.

The solution recognizes over 3,000 apps automatically, and intelligently prioritizes business-critical application traffic, providing a better user experience. The solution 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 (PoPs) close to the eero Wi-Fi users. These PoPs are strategically placed at the doorstep of major SaaS and IaaS providers to offer under 15 milliseconds of latency between users and their applications in the majority of deployments.

For IT teams, 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. In addition, VMware SASE uses AIOps to give IT teams the visibility they need to determine the actual user experience when users access cloud applications.

The solution compares performance benchmarks between different sites and identifies opportunities for improvement. The solution is not limited to simply identifying and analyzing issues, it also helps remediate these issues proactively with a path to self-healing.

Craig Connors, vice president and CTO, Service Provider and Edge, VMware, added, “This collaboration brings together two work-from-home technology leaders. 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.”