Today, I’m excited to announce the scheduled expansion of VMware Horizon® Air™ cloud services into two major markets in the Asia Pacific region – Australia and Japan. This is another example of the growing footprint and interest in cloud-hosted services by VMware from customers around the world. Customers can now take advantage of VMware vCloud® Air™ services for infrastructure-as-a-service and disaster recovery as well as desktop-as-a-service capabilities with Horizon Air.
With this expansion expected later this quarter, VMware will become the most geographically distributed desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) provider in the industry with four locations in the United States (Santa Clara, CA, Las Vegas, NV, Sterling, VA and Dallas, TX) and three in EMEA (U.K., France and Germany).
In addition, VMware Horizon Air will be introducing several new features this quarter that will further simplify the provisioning, delivery and management of cloud-hosted desktops and applications.
The new features will include:
- New IT administration console that will simplify the management and monitoring of cloud-hosted desktops and applications. This includes new wizards for creating desktop and application services, user/group search capabilities, and simplified management of desktop pools.
- New APIs to make administrative functions available programmatically. This will include the ability for IT to build custom workflows and processes for actions such as creating a virtual desktop, assigning to a pool, and much more.
VMware Horizon Air supports business mobility by enabling end-user access to full Windows desktops and applications through the cloud – from anywhere, at anytime – using desktops or laptops (PC or Mac), zero/thin clients, Chromebooks or mobile devices (Android or iOS). As a result, the total cost of ownership can be reduced by offloading operational overhead and eliminating upfront capital costs.
This means organizations can deliver the benefits of virtual desktops with monthly subscription fees that are predictable and flexible.
VMware Horizon Air services will be available in Australia and Japan this quarter so stay tuned for the GA!
