In a recent interview, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said VMware's strategy comes down to three major initiatives: Creating a software-defined data center; delivering it both on customer premises and in the cloud; and end-user computing.
The company is one of a handful of virtual desktop infrastructure leaders, but mobile computing is the next frontier that VMware will look to expand its services into and the solutions announcements at VMworld 2016 seem to bear out Gelsinger’s vision.
According to former SAP mobile chief Sanjay Poonen, who is now executive vice president and general manager, End-User Computing and head of global marketing and communications at VMware, the company was working to transform the end user to prepare for mobile Cloud era where previously they had been working to transform the data center to make it public Cloud ready.
As part of this, Ray O'Farrell, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at VMware, said that there was a focus on simplicity and security. In doing so, O'Farrell said that they could potentially help lower cost of ownership of Windows 10 based devices by 15% to 30%.
Access to applications across multiple devices via a single sign-on was another key feature that VMware stressed companies were constantly seeking to deploy.
Managing devices as they move across corporate networks and access services from Cloud based service providers is making it hard for IT to keep up with securing both mobile and traditional endpoints. As such, the new solutions the company is offering will provide unified endpoint management to help manage both mobile and desktop endpoints.
Industry analyst firm Gartner reports that, "The future of endpoint management lies in consolidation of management tools that manage traditional PCs and mobile devices as a common management framework evolves across the two."
To help meet these demands, VMware announced a new unified endpoint management approach for managing Windows 10, along with advancements to VMware Horizon and VMware Workspace ONE.
These innovations help advance the digital workspace embraced by the industry and solve the challenge of supporting an increasingly mobile workforce that demands anytime, anywhere access to all applications from any device.
If successful, the new approach could speed the process for pushing things like OS updates and patches. By managing desktop and mobile together, it could also make it easier and cheaper to manage Windows device deployments overall.
"Customers say that managing multiple consoles for all their endpoint solutions is getting more cumbersome by the day," said Orion Hindawi, cofounder and CEO, Tanium. "They need a streamlined solution that takes into account things like cloud, virtualization, mobility and the increased scale those changes have driven. They need less complexity to do more good work."
Key solutions features
Key highlights to the VMware Horizon enhancements include:
- Enhanced Features in Blast – The VMware Blast Extreme protocol will provide increased performance with up to a 6x reduction in image bandwidth consumption and a 15 percent reduction in audio streaming to deliver a rich experience for end-users consuming virtual Windows applications and desktops. New support for Riverbed technology in Horizon 7 will increase access speeds for end-users on wide area networks (WAN) and 3D graphics applications with Horizon 7 will see up to a 24 millisecond latency reduction when used with NVIDIA GRID. Lastly, Horizon 7 will offer support for the Swiftpoint mouse when consuming virtual desktops and applications on iPads and other iOS devices.
- High Performance Affordable Devices – An expanding list of Blast-enabled devices will include new validated thin and zero clients from Dell, HP and iGEL, along with the technology preview of support for Raspberry Pi. This will provide customers the flexibility to use Blast to deliver high quality Horizon 7 or Horizon Air desktops and applications using affordable hardware to lower the overall cost of providing and managing enterprise desktops.
- Cloud Managed Plug-and-Play Appliances – New validated appliances for Horizon Air Hybrid Mode from Dell, EMC, Hitachi Data Systems and QCT will support the rapid setup and delivery of virtual desktops and applications. Horizon Air provides full lifecycle management of the desktops and applications from the cloud, significantly minimizing provisioning, setup and configuration time and enabling automatic cloud-driven updates.
Workspace ONE with VMware Identity Manager helps customers overcome the deployment and management challenges of Office 365. Enhancements to the solution will enable administrators to automatically provision and de-provision end users based on existing active directory group membership. When employees leave an organization, access to cloud-based Office 365 resources is immediately revoked through entitlement management, whereas previously authentication tokens could be valid for hours or days after separation. Updates to the VMware Verify mobile push-application will also offer a consumer-simple registration workflow that eliminates the need for end-users to download and register a two-factor authentication (2FA) application.