What’s next for VMware End-User Computing (EUC)? Pat Lee, vice president of product management for cloud apps and desktops at VMware, recently talked about this and much more on EUC podcast Frontline Chatter.
“We’re always going to be improving and making constant changes each quarter to address customer concerns, figure out the use cases and provide a competitive and truly strong solution in the marketplace.”
Listen to the episode on SoundCloud to hear Pat’s thoughts on the evolution of VMware EUC, his favorite VMware projects and the crazy world that is the Internet of Things:
“In the last 36 months, we had a foundation in place that was good, but we really needed to scale it to be more successful in the market. We focused on some key areas. One, how do we deliver that end-user PC experience to as many users as possible? Early on, when you saw VDI, it was a great tactical solution when security, compliance and call centers were required, but it didn’t give you all the things you expected from a user experience: seamless web cam use, seamless local storage access, etc. All those things have to come into play so you can provide that native PC experience remotely. We made a big focus on: How can we expand our client story? How can we expand all the things that are required to deliver that rich user experience?”
[Read more: The Next Horizon! Introducing Horizon 7.1, Horizon Apps & Horizon Cloud]
On Blast Extreme, Pat explains how trends, such as increased mobility, drove the project:
“Our goal was to look at how things were changing. Most display protocols that we’d been working with and going up against were designed for the LAN, for a well secured corporate network. Sure there’s some remote access that happens with it, but a lot of it’s really designed around LAN delivery, network on-prem delivery. As we looked at how things were changing, desktop-as-a-service was becoming more viable. So public internet is coming into play—a lot more public internet usage is happening to connect the desktops. A lot more mobility—iOS, there’s Android. How do we give you a good experience for cases where I need to work on a laptop in a coffee shop for hours at a time, where battery life matters? From a codec perspective, what can we do to maximize the battery life of the client so you can work with mobility? … How do we focus Blast Extreme when the world is changing—more mobile, public internet, wireless delivery—and with more portable devices where battery life matters? So we sat down and said, if we can leverage things like industry-standard codecs, like H.264—which every device you have today, even refrigerators in your house, have a H.264 decoder in them—we can do hardware offloads, we can get maximum battery life … We were able to have a 10-hour desktop session on an iPad using Blast Extreme because we’re leveraging hardware … Those types of things bring a whole new level into what you can do when you look at mobility.”
[Read more: VMware Horizon 7 Blast Extreme Primer—Everything an Admin Needs to Know]
On the future of VMware EUC, Pat talks about strategically leveraging the cloud:
“How do we move to a cloud-centric vision for EUC? That doesn’t mean everything goes in the cloud but leveraging the cloud to solve critical problems, and for people that want to go all-in on the cloud, to give them a great cloud solution. We introduced Horizon Air Hybrid-Mode last year, the ability to have a cloud-managed, local delivery of VDI, and that was Phase One … With Horizon Air Hybrid-Mode, you see the first step in how we can deliver an on-prem solution that gives you a fast, low latency, high performance solution, but with you getting out of the infrastructure management game … If we can simplify the mundane tasks of delivery so you can focus on what you really care about—‘how do I get that desktop to the user, or the app to the user’—in the simplest way, we will have done our job.”
[Read more: Here Comes … Horizon Cloud]
Catch the complete conversation here.
