Infotech Lead America: At VMworld 2013, VMware unveiled new capabilities and partnerships for its VMware Horizon Suite to support the growing mobile workforce.
The company has announced a combination of new desktop-as-a service, VMware Ready, a growing community of desktop and mobile partners, and integrated device and workspace management that reinforces VMware Horizon Suite as one of the industry’s most comprehensive and integrated platform to enable an increasingly mobile workforce.
The new desktop-as-a-service deployment option for VMware Horizon View offers organizations that lack VDI expertise an easy transition to virtual desktops.
The new VMware Horizon View Desktop-as-a-Service on VMware vCloud Hybrid Service allows organizations to deploy Horizon View using VMware vCloud Hybrid Service. This deployment option gives IT a common platform to seamlessly extend desktops and the data center to the cloud leveraging the same tools and processes.
The solution is deal for delivering greater mobility and accessibility by deploying desktops from the cloud and users can choose from a wide range of global service providers to meet any use case or business need.
This new capability gives organizations the choice to deploy desktop-as-a-service on vCloud Hybrid Service themselves or through a managed service provider. It provides mobile workforce with a capability to support the latest mobile devices as end users still need powerful computing for content creation, legacy applications and business operations.
Modernizing traditional PCs with virtual desktops enables IT administrators to grant end users greater mobility and access to corporate data, applications and desktops without compromising security or control.
The new VMware Horizon View Desktop-as-a-Service is available through vCloud Partners.
VMware also announced the latest VMware Ready smartphones offering support for Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiatives. The list of smartphones supporting Horizon Workspace includes the recently launched LG G2 that will be on all major US carriers, Motorola DROID family of smartphones (DROID Mini, DROID Ultra and DROID Maxx) as well as HTC One through Verizon Wireless.
Other VMware Ready devices already in the market include the LG Intuition, Samsung Galaxy S3 and S4, Droid Razr HD and Razr M by Motorola.
Sony and HTC join the growing community of mobile partners who will introduce devices that are attractive to consumers and manageable by corporate IT using the dual persona capability found in Horizon Workspace. Sony is expected to introduce new VMware Ready smartphones this year.
Horizon Workspace 1.5 is the highly integrated mobile management solution that adds to the single, aggregated workspace that combines data, applications and desktops. The solution now offers a single integrated management interface to support Android devices alongside all other components of the workspace with the integration of VMware Horizon Mobile.