We are excited to be recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape Worldwide Virtual Client Computing (VCC) 2022–2023 Vendor Assessment report (December 2022, IDC #US49857422). This distinction marks the sixth consecutive time VMware has received this industry recognition for this market. The report provides an independent assessment of vendor strategies and capabilities as it relates to desktop and app virtualization.
IDC MarketScape vendor analysis model is designed to provide an overview of the competitive fitness of ICT suppliers in a given market. The research methodology utilizes a rigorous scoring methodology based on both qualitative and quantitative criteria that results in a single graphical illustration of each vendor’s position within a given market. The Capabilities score measures vendor product, go-to-market and business execution in the short-term. The Strategy score measures alignment of vendor strategies with customer requirements in a 3-5-year timeframe. Vendor market share is represented by the size of the icons.
We believe being recognized as a Leader in this report validates that we are delivering innovative capabilities and our strategy is resonating with customers in their journey towards hybrid and multi-cloud VDI and apps. VMware Horizon has long been used by customers as a modern platform for secure delivery of virtual desktops and apps. IT organizations have been able to uniquely combine Horizon with their underlying VMware SDDC stack and digital workspace technologies to enable employees with secure access to corporate resources from any endpoint device. Several years ago, customers began leveraging hyperscaler capacity to deliver Horizon virtual desktops and apps from the public cloud, along with their private cloud Horizon deployments, all managed through the SaaS-based Horizon Control Plane. In 2020, the COVID pandemic forced many businesses to find ways to support employees who had to work from home. This new business continuity requirement led to more customers for technologies like Horizon. Many of those customers leveraged hyperscaler capacity to augment their on-premises Horizon deployment, rather than add data center infrastructure.
The IDC MarketScape report notes, “The pandemic vastly accelerated this [virtual client computing] adoption, forcing some organizations to go ‘all in,’ and others to expand their installations, offering anywhere in the range of 50–100% of their workspaces through a combination of virtualized applications for specific uses and virtualized desktops for general activities. The use cases also expanded alongside a wave of security incidents, with security firms discovering they could quickly restore a company to business functionality through judicious virtualization of key applications, data, and desktop assets.”
As customers approach the next phase of their journey to using VDI and published apps for hybrid work, we’ll continue to focus on three main pillars that we believe have kept VMware as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape VCC reports and provide greatest value to our customers.
Reducing TCO for the business
- As the VDI and published apps market has matured, customers are looking for ways to lower costs in their deployments. To help reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), we made some big announcements at VMware Explore this year, and one of them was the general availability of our Horizon Cloud next-gen platform. The platform consists of a “thin edge” architecture that moves infrastructure components of Horizon deployments to the cloud, hosted and managed by VMware. For IT staffs, fewer components to procure and maintain means less time and costs associated with managing those components.
- Another innovation we announced at VMware Explore this year was Published Apps on Demand. Apps on Demand functionality was made available in VMware App Volumes last year, with the idea of dynamically attaching apps to virtual desktops when users actually use the apps, instead of at user login, without requiring all apps to be installed on the OS image and provisioned to every virtual desktop. The same idea is being extended to delivering apps to generic RDSH hosts with Published Apps on Demand. IT admins no longer need to set up RDSH hosts for max app and user utilization, regardless of if they are hosting apps on Horizon, Citrix, or Microsoft environments. Instead, with Published Apps on Demand, IT admins can consolidate dedicated apps infrastructure and provide just the capacity needed for on-demand functionality that delivers apps to RDSH hosts only when employees use their apps, not based on the possible peak usage of all apps.
Simplifying management and focusing on security for IT
- Management for Horizon deployments should be the same no matter where an organization decides to deploy their virtual desktops and apps, whether on-premises, only in the public cloud, a mix of both, and even across multi-cloud. The Horizon Control Plane is that single pane of glass that provides SaaS services for IT to manage their private and public cloud desktop and app deployments. With services like universal brokering, image management, availability monitoring, and more, IT can efficiently deploy, manage, and monitor virtual desktops and apps across Horizon pods and cloud environments from a single console.
- Secure access to corporate resources is a top use case for deploying virtual desktops and apps, and with that in mind, we have continued to add security features to the Horizon platform. For example, we released forensics for Horizon admins to save session information needed for audit and compliance or troubleshooting needs. Customers, including The Netherlands Cancer Institute, are also using Horizon with VMware security solutions like NSX to help micro-segment their environment and improve their end-to-end security posture.
Providing the best remote experience for end users
- If IT can’t offer a great user experience for employees who access virtual desktops and apps, productivity and employee satisfaction will decline. VMware continuously invests in our VMware Blast protocol to provide the best experience for Horizon users accessing virtual desktops and apps. With optimization packs for collaboration tools — such as Microsoft Teams, Webex, and Zoom — support for GPU use cases, and vast remote experience features and client support, users have an experience similar to the one they’re used to with physical PCs.
- Due to hybrid work, digital employee experience (DEX) is a hot topic for organizations. With Workspace ONE Intelligence and Experience Analytics for Horizon, IT can use machine learning-based insights to optimize digital employee experience across virtual desktop and app environments. By proactively identifying and remediating configurations and conditions that may lead to impacted performance or even an outage, IT can proactively and intelligently optimize experience for Horizon users,
You can download an excerpt about VMware’s solutions from the 2022–2023 IDC MarketScape for Virtual Client Computing report here. And for more information on VMware Horizon, visit http://vmware.com/go/horizon.
