There has been a lot of interest and comments online about VMware’s recent announcement of the acquisition of AirWatch (mostly positive). My take is that this acquisition, in combination with their acquisition of Desktone, (leading Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) vendor), in October, signals that VMware (and probably other players as well) are finally taking the “End User” in End User Computing, seriously. What do I mean by that?
VDI Memory Lane
Those of you who have followed the evolution of this market may recall that VMware initially entered the “VDI” market when they found some customers creating their own ESX use case by creating “virtual desktops” that ran on top of VMware server virtualization (which has evolved from “ESX + Virtual Center”, to Virtual Infrastructure / VI3 and finally in the Paul Maritz era, to the “vSphere” branding VMware uses today). VMware and others (most notably, Citrix) developed a set of VDI offerings that included thin clients, connection brokers, identity management, etc…, to support the many specialized needs of the VDI use case.
IT organizations have been on board with the “virtual desktop vision” for a long time and there have been many thousands of pilots and smaller implementations. What has not happened (yet) is a rush toward broad, comprehensive adoption across entire organizations. The technology has improved and the supporting technologies to optimize infrastructure for VDI with improved performance and reduced costs for storage, networking, etc…, have improved just as fast. VMware has had success when they could get customers focused on the value of the underlying virtual infrastructure, and Citrix has had success when they could get customers focused on the application being delivered, and how they could impact that delivery.
The Audience
These VDI products have had to appeal to two very different audiences; IT, who set up and administered the system, and the employees, who worked on their virtual desktops/thin clients throughout the day. In recognition of the importance of the end user experience, and the development of some new use cases, VMware began referring to this market as “End User Computing”, and in the Paul Maritz era, branded the product offering as “VMware View”. With some acquisitions, experiments like “Project Octopus” and the creation of adjacent products like Mirage and Horizon, VMware created the Horizon Suite, with the current (long-winded) branding of Horizon View, Horizon Mirage and Horizon Workspace. In the last couple of years, close observers may have noticed that VMware began inserting the word “mobility” next to “End User Computing” in their messaging. While the connection and products were not clear yet, an aspiration taking shape. Mobility and device proliferation are real trends – what has not been clear is how the IT industry is going to embrace and accelerate these trends (beyond managing the existing sprawl with MDM).
What does this all mean?
That was an invigorating walk down memory lane, but what does that say about the AirWatch acquisition and the “End User”? What these acquisitions say to me is that VMware sees that the end-user experience as critical to taking this market to the inflection point of adoption, is ready to go beyond its core IT audience, and will be addressing this opportunity by:
1) Delivering their EUC offerings as-a-service, leveraging Desktone/DaaS approaches, and their cloud service (vCHS)
2) Enabling End User productivity with a more comprehensive approach to mobility that goes beyond “managing device sprawl with MDM”, and building back-end VDI infrastructure for IT.
It will be interesting to follow these developments and to see if we look back at 2014 as the first year of the mobile workspace era (enabled through virtual desktops).
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