VMware Horizon

VMware Horizon Air Adds New Cloud Service for End-Users

Erik FriebergBy Erik Frieberg, VP of Marketing, End-User Computing, VMware

Hola from Barcelona! It’s about 70 degrees and a bit humid here in the city… and it feels like I haven’t left Palo Alto. Regardless of how similar the weather might be, Barcelona is one of a kind when it comes to its food and hospitality. That’s why this has always been one of my favorite cities to visit every year.

Today at VMworld Europe, we introduced VMware App Volumes and VMware Horizon® FLEX™, and Sumit Dhawan has written a great, high level wrap up of the these new products. If you want a deeper dive into the new VMware App Volumes product or Horizon FLEX, you can read a blog post by Harry Labana and Kit Colbert.

What I’d like to do is give you more insight into our hosted cloud services and a brand new service, VMware Horizon Air™ Desktop DR.

As you know, we acquired Desktone around this time last year and later renamed it to VMware Horizon DaaS. We integrated it with our Horizon portfolio, grew our service provider partner network, invested in innovation to bring to market the very first hybrid DaaS offering in the industry, and added applications-as-a-service at VMworld U.S. 6 weeks ago.

With the rebranding of VMware vCloud Hybrid Service to VMware vCloud® Air™, VMware Horizon DaaS® has been rebranded to VMware Horizon Air to stay consistent with the new “Air” brand for all of VMware’s “as-a-service” offerings. Now, the complete line-up of end-user computing hosted cloud services will follow that naming convention.

Horizon Air slide

We also introduced a brand new solution today called VMware Horizon Air Desktop DR. An industry first, VMware Horizon Air Desktop DR is a new service that will enable organizations to easily protect their business and ensure workforce continuity with affordable cloud-hosted desktops and applications. In the event of a disaster, IT will be able to get users up and running quickly with the speed of the cloud without the complexity and cost of physical desktop disaster recovery solutions. End-users can be productive instantly, from any device, anywhere, with a secure workspace connected to their corporate resources.

In addition to this, we’re extending all of our cloud services to France and Germany later in Q1.

What does this mean for customers?

It means that any company with employees in global locations such as the U.S., U.K., France and Germany can now take advantage of the speed, agility and economics of the cloud, and provision desktops, applications and disaster recovery directly through the cloud.

VMware has made a lot of investments in this area and in just one year, we have built out our product portfolio to include three exciting new services that will help customers save time and money.

  • VMware Horizon Air Desktops – The industry’s first hybrid desktop as a service (DaaS) solution that gives customers the ability to blend public cloud desktops and on-premise VMware Horizon 6 private cloud desktops for a seamless end-user experience.
  • VMware Horizon Air Apps – The only solution in the industry to offer comprehensive delivery of published applications, shared desktop sessions, and full virtual desktops and applications via a multi-tenant public cloud DaaS.
  • VMware Horizon Air Desktop DR – The first in the industry to offer an affordable cloud-hosted desktop and application solution for disaster recovery to protect businesses and assist with workforce continuity.

As we have said and shown throughout the year, the VMware End-User Computing group is innovating at a rapid pace and we’re not letting our foot off the pedal. We’ve introduced the industry’s first hybrid DaaS, virtual apps, high performance desktops and apps with Google and NVIDIA, local virtual desktops and disaster recovery through the cloud – just to name a few.

Since it’s mid-October already, we might take a break but don’t be surprised if we make a few more announcements before the year-end. 🙂

In the meantime, think about how much time and money you’re spending on supporting enterprise desktops and applications and if a hosted cloud service might be right for you. Leave your questions and comments below, and I’ll make sure to get back to you as soon as I can when I’m back from Barcelona.