Omnissa Horizon: How we’re investing in the future of VDI, DaaS, and apps

For nearly two decades, tens of thousands of IT organizations worldwide and across all industries have trusted Horizon^® for virtual desktop and app delivery. With modern industry-leading capabilities, Horizon offers customers choices to meet their requirements with persistent, non-persistent, and multi-session deployment options on-premises, in the public cloud, or across the hybrid cloud.

During our transition to Omnissa, we've continued to innovate on our core solutions, including Virtual Desktops and Apps — and the future for Omnissa Horizon couldn't be brighter! We are accelerating innovation in the VDI, DaaS, and published apps market by focusing on three strategic initiatives: helping customers reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) with unification and automation, simplifying app management for any deployment, and optimizing security and user experience simultaneously.

Reducing TCO with unification and automation

Ongoing and increasing delivery costs are common challenges customers face when managing desktops and apps, especially when they're using a legacy VDI and published apps vendor. Roughly 31% of an organization’s tech is comprised of legacy systems, with maintenance costing 60% to 80% of IT budgets.

To address this challenge, we help customers reduce TCO by unifying and automating management. The Horizon Control Plane unifies management across all deployment options, including Horizon 8 on-premises or in the cloud, and desktop as a service (DaaS) through Horizon Cloud. Modern SaaS services offered through the Horizon Control Plane include image and app management, brokering, automation, and monitoring.

Building additional services to streamline infrastructure upgrades is one of our top priorities to reduce Day 2 management costs. We'll also continue to enhance integrations with data and orchestration engines, like Omnissa Intelligence and Omnissa Freestyle Orchestrator to drive new AI-powered capabilities, saving IT teams time by automating workflows.

Simplifying app lifecycle management for any VDI, DaaS, or published app deployment

Managing base OS images and app lifecycle in VDI or app hosts has traditionally been difficult. Image sprawl, entitlements, and frequency of updates are some of the time-consuming complexities in keeping desktops and app hosts secure and apps available.

Omnissa App Volumes spearheads our approach to managing apps across any environment as part of our Apps Everywhere vision. App Volumes uniquely separates app management from the OS image to simplify lifecycle management, reducing management time and infrastructure costs — and is now also available for persistent desktops. Apps on Demand is our latest innovation that further reduces costs for Horizon and Citrix environments. Aligning with our Apps Everywhere vision, App Volumes now includes support for Microsoft and Amazon DaaS deployments. We're uniquely positioned to enable IT organizations to manage applications everywhere using a single solution.

Optimizing security and experience simultaneously​

Almost 90% of employees knowingly take actions that bypass security controls and increase risk for their organization. In today’s world of hybrid work, balancing security and user experience continues to be challenging. Horizon has always been at the forefront of providing secure access to corporate resources without compromising user experience.

IT organizations use Horizon to centrally host and manage desktops and apps, minimizing endpoint data loss and making it easier to patch and protect them. With Horizon as part of the Omnissa platform, IT teams can use Workspace ONE^® UEM to manage and secure virtual desktops, app hosts, and any end-user device that accesses a virtual desktop or app. Furthermore, Dynamic Environment Manager offers complete access control with policy and profile management across virtual and physical endpoints. Giving customers options to add layers of security according to their requirements is a key tenet we uphold.

Providing a best-in-class user experience in Horizon starts with our Blast Extreme protocol. Supported on a wide variety of devices, Blast allows users to access their Horizon virtual desktops and apps even under high latency, low bandwidth scenarios with no noticeable difference from using a physical device. Horizon offers an optimized experience across popular apps like Teams, Zoom, and Webex inside virtual desktops. If customers have use cases that require high-end graphics, we partner with NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD to deliver 3D and GPU-powered desktops and apps. User experience is an area we'll continue to invest in as user, device, and work trends evolve.

Next steps for Omnissa Horizon

These strategic initiatives lay the groundwork for shaping the future of desktop and app virtualization with Horizon. We are excited to transform the landscape of virtual desktop and app delivery, making it simpler, more secure, and more powerful than ever before. To dive further into Horizon, I encourage you to visit Omnissa.com and Omnissa Tech Zone for Horizon Cloud and Horizon 8 resources.