PCs were initially designed to be standalone devices – universal connectivity only came later. We can see this characteristic still reflected in many current applications, which are designed to act on single objects and files.
Consider a presentation – produced using one of the best known tools in the market. It might make nice slides (ok, that’s a matter of taste), but it immediately becomes less effective when multiple parties co-author the content. When working with colleagues on collaborative input, we must either impose our own version control mechanisms manually (“ok, I’ve got the file now”) or waste time reconciling information later. This application simply doesn’t represent the way we really work now – in terms of process. Sliderocket – which we acquired earlier this year – fixes this, enabling teams to collaborate on the same presentation material. No more manual version control, no more wasted time.
As organizations move their applications from the desktop to the cloud, one of the main inhibiting factors will be the availability of next generation applications to replace those they have now. This is one reason we’ve made forays into the application world – to ensure organizations can carry on making their EUC journeys.
Entirely cloud-based capabilities assume the permanent availability of a network connection that organizations are happy to use. In the real world, that may not always be the case – perhaps there genuinely is no signal or bandwidth, or perhaps the user just doesn’t feel secure in a specific location. Offline capabilities will still be needed sometimes and to use them will require mechanisms for creating secure footprints on the user’s device. For PCs, that’s straightforward thanks to our decade of history in desktop virtualization, but on mobile devices it presents more of a challenge – due to the fragmented nature of mobile devices and their smaller computational envelopes.
Our Horizon Mobile capabilities (previously known as the Mobile Virtualization Platform – MVP) enable the creation of a robustly sealed environment on mobile devices that supports all compute and communication functions. This environment is delivered and managed through the Horizon platform. It can be synchronized with the cloud persona, supporting a seamless copy of each user’s EUC workspace.
