By Srinivas Krishnamurti, Senior Director of mobile product management, End-User Computing, VMware
Today I’m very excited to announce the immediate availability of two VMware Ready devices – LG Intuition and Razr M by Motorola – on Verizon Wireless. These devices are now equipped with VMware’s virtualization technology required to run our dual personal solution, VMware Horizon Mobile. This is an important milestone for VMware as we deliver on our end-user computing vision of managing users, not devices. We will continue to work closely with Verizon Wireless to enable a broad set of new and existing devices to be VMware Ready. You might be asking yourself what is a VMware Ready device? Well, in this blog I will provide a quick overview of Horizon Mobile and VMware Ready program.
VMware Horizon Mobile Overview
Perhaps even more profound than the BYOD trend is the change in how employees use their devices. Irrespective of who actually buys or owns the device, the corporation or the user, most employees tend to download personal apps onto these devices – Facebook, Angry Birds, Temple Run, etc. coexist with work email/PIM. It is fair to assume then that most devices will have both personal and corporate content (apps, data and services).
Given that the usage paradigms have changed, IT needs to rethink security and manageability of mobile devices. The old BlackBerry model of locking and wiping the device is no longer in line with how employees use their devices. IT administrators can now leverage VMware Horizon Mobile to isolate personal content from corporate content and only manage the corporate content on the device. The corporate content resides in a “workspace” whose lifecycle and usage is managed by IT. IT can customize what apps are in the workspace and what policies are applied to the workspace, provision the workspace to the user’s device over the air (OTA) and then manage its lifecycle remotely.
If you look at the latest mobile OS market share information, Android is way ahead of other mobile operating systems but if you consider the enterprise subset of that market share, iOS is the dominant platform. One of the reasons for Android not being dominant is its fragmentation, which makes it very difficult for IT to wrap their hands and heads around a comprehensive security and manageability story for Android devices. VMware Horizon Mobile leverages device virtualization to normalize that fragmentation and allows IT to deploy and manage its own Android workspace that looks and behaves the same on any Android device. However, in order to run this solution, you must have a VMware Ready device and hence, the importance of today’s announcement.
You can see the product in action here.
VMware Ready Program
VMware Ready designates VMware’s highest level of endorsement for products and solutions created by our established partners – and on the mobile side, a VMware Ready device is required to experience our dual persona solution. In the US, VMware is partnering with Verizon to enable a broad set of new and existing devices to become VMware Ready and it’s important to note is that existing in-market devices can be updated over-the-air (OTA) to become VMware Ready devices.
Indeed this is the case with LG Intuition and Razr M by Motorola. Both of these devices have been in the market for several months and recently received a software update. The update pushed out by Verizon included the right VMware technologies to enable them to run a second instance of Android and thereby, our Horizon Mobile solution.
Our customers should expect popular in-market devices will receive similar software updates resulting in a broad set of VMware Ready devices in the market. In fact, we anticipate many new devices will also launch as VMware Ready devices.
We’re looking forward to seeing many more VMware Ready devices in the market and if you’re an Android OEM interested in getting involved with the VMware Ready program, please contact us at mvp-oem-public @ vmware.com for more information.
On a more personal note… Over the weekend, I had some time to review some of the strategy documents and initial business plans that I put together when we first started on the mobile initiative. It is personally gratifying to see first hand how all this has come together and reflect on the journey that got us here.
It’s been a great experience getting to this point and we’re proud to walk hand in hand with LG to deliver the first VMware Ready device on Verizon Wireless. My sincere thanks to all the wonderful folks at LG who partnered with us and worked tirelessly through the various stages of our product development and betas to enable the LG Intuition as the first VMware Ready device on our partner’s network.
So what do you think of our approach to managing enterprise mobile users? Do you like the idea of managing just the corporate workspace and not the entire device? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section below.
