VMware's plan is to deliver incremental benefits and expand the scope of product and solution awareness to drive toward introducing customer self-service opportunities within the development and release a roadmap.

This will help us add value quickly as we introduce the VMware Skyline Viewer for support engineers, which is to be utilized in both proactive and reactive support engagements with customers. We plan to make the VMware Skyline Advisor workbench available to various support teams, along with product engineering teams, so that they can actively participate in the creation of new rules and analysis as we expand our ability to automatically detect known issues or recommendations. VMware Skyline will also provide added support service capabilities to customers in future who have production support and Premier Support Services in the form of self-service solutions.

VMware Skyline fits into Global Services' overall vision, as VMware strives to provide best in class support to our customers, as represented by our high customer satisfaction and net promoter score (NPS). As the competition attempts to close that gap, we innovate. VMware Skyline is one of those innovations that puts us ahead of the competition in both reactive and proactive support. No other full stack software company provides this level of capability. VMware Skyline focuses on transforming the customer experience, and the key way that we do this is by building customer intimacy. If we know and understand what our customers are doing, we can more readily engage with them proactively, in order to provide assistance and guidance.

VMware Skyline can be rolled out in a very large customer environment, phase-wise and during the initial rollout. It is best to collect from a single vCenter, have the customer give us feedback on the value that we're providing, and then keep adding incrementally. There will be some scale scenarios that we will hit in the real world that we will never encounter in testing, and we can identify those through a measured adoption plan. We don't recommend any aggressive approaches to an initial enterprise software drop. The collector attaches itself to a vCenter. It can connect to multiple vCenters, as well, but it can always be split on a per-vCenter basis. Very large, multi-vCenter environments will also require multi-collector setups. The collector appliance should also be as near to the vCenter as possible, in terms of network traffic, so as to not stress sending data over the WAN. Multiple physical data centers will also lean toward multi-collector setups for each location. Data is tied together on the backend, so we know that it all came from the same customer.

At any point in time, customers can opt out of the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP). Customers can unregister Skyline Collector from operations and disable all Skyline functionality from their environment. Data that's been collected will be retained for a 13-month period for customer-identifiable information, and for up to four years for other collected data. Product-related data is saved and used for different processes, along with the end-to-end security for this data. We can manage data and de-identify as required. We can encrypt data in storage and in motion, as well as all kinds of all kinds of physical security such as firewall, HIPS, IDS, and so on. We can also design data backups, disaster recovery, and other security processes for this data with proper auditing. VMware is responsible for managing this collected data to provide better technical support, along with product enhancement.

We must meet the criteria to gain access to VMware Skyline product usage data. This includes completing training for the product usage data policy, acknowledging your responsibility for how this data is used, and submitting a formal request that identifies other details about our intended use. The process continues with our manager's review, and, in exceptional cases, with the data trustee's review. If your request is approved, then your access can be provisioned at the approved system(s). We are planning to expand the requesting process to an enterprise identity access management system. This will be part of an external facing website that we can share with customers. 

 Customers can download Skyline Collector via the following simple steps:

1. Click on the https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=SKYLINE10&productId=790&rPId=26633 link to go to the VMware Skyline download site:
2. Log in to Skyline Collector using your credentials:
3. Once you have accepted Skyline's privacy policy, you can start to install the Collector appliance.

4. Fill out a few simple configuration web pages with My VMware credentials and entitlement account information to register the collector to learn the basic setup.