UPDATED 13:01 EDT / AUGUST 30 2011

Workplaces Mobilize As VMWare Digs Into iOS, Android

As the VMworld conference in Las Vegas pushes into its second day, we recap on VMWare’s day 1 highlights around PC virtualization, as it rolls out View 5.0.  VMWare aims to integrate work to a worker’s personal device through virtualization of data, making all the applications you need available in your workstation as well as your mobile device as well as expanding coverage for its “Project Harmony” Horizon application manager.

View 5.0 desktop virtualization software is based on the latest ESXi 5.0 hypervisor that is wrapped by a set of management tools called vSphere and administered by a management console called vCenter.  The View 5 bundle comes with vSphere, vCenter, and vShield, and is priced at $250 per concurrent user.  Concurrency ratio varies as educational institutions have a 1:4 or 1:5, while companies have 1:2 or 1:3, while businesses that have larger population of knowledge employees have 7 to 8 concurrent users.  The View allows translation between iOS devices and Windows desktops as well as translation of Windows-based applications for Android devices but no webOS support.

The View 5 will come in two editions: The Enterprise Edition, which has the vSphere 5 distribution tuned for streaming desktops, vCenter Server 5.0, and View Manager 5.0 and comes at $150 per concurrent user; And the Premier Edition which has the View Client with Local Mode, ThinkApp 4.6 application streaming, View Composer and vShield endpoint protection and is priced at $250 per concurrent user.

VMWare’s Horizon Application Manager is a SaaS-style application that provides centralized authentication and self-service access to SaaS-style applications.  Horizon has been tweaked to push apps to Android devices that have the Horizon Mobile virtualization hypervisor.

But VMware isn’t the only one with virtualized workspaces in mind.  With Citrix’s acquisition of Cloud.com and the launch of CloudStack 2.2.10 this week at the VMworld 2011 conference the framework now supports VMware’s newly launched ESXi 5.0 hypervisor and Oracle’s VM 2.X variants of the Xen hypervisor, to complement the range of VMware, KVM and Xen hypervisors it already supports.

Samsung has already shown support for the VMWare Hypervisor, as they plan to make smartphones and tablets that will run on this.  The company has not yet made an announcement as to which of their devices will have the VMWare Hypervisor.

IBM is also launching, Connections for mobile, that will help organizations embrace social networking using the broadest range of mobile devices.   Connections features File share application, Profiles, and Activities, Blogs and generate-and-vote-on-ideas features.   Workers can now take photos with their smartphones and upload them directly to Connections using their  Apple, Android or BlackBerry smartphones or tablets.

Since more companies are now allowing the use of personal mobile devices in the workplace, it has created problems for company IT departmentss when they needed to wipe company data from the worker’s device as there was always a risk of wiping personal data.  A new collaboration software allows for “partial wipe” on iOS devices, which allows workers to keep personal data on their device when company data is erased from it.

Android devices will have features such as Click-to-call from the device calendar, Unified Communications, which extends presence awareness, and instant messaging with new features including text-to-speech which can read incoming messages when the users cannot stop to look at the device, for example, when driving, send photos taken with the device through Sametime chats, and automatically update location status. Workers who also have Sametime Unified Telephony software reduce phone use costs by initiating calls to whatever phone happens to be nearby and will soon have the LotusLive Meetings for cloud-based meetings.  BlackBerry users will be able to participate in online meetings using their mobile devices.

Wyse is also dipping into the pool with the latest version of Wyse PocketCloud Pro for Android devices.   The PocketCloud Pro v1.3 is based on Microsoft RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) and it eliminates the need for users to connect their smartphones or tablets just to access the applications they need to edit their files.  Users are able to drag and drop files from Android devices to PCs or vice versa and still allows remote desktop access.

“At its core, PocketCloud has always been about making computing on mobile devices easy, intuitive and secure,” says Daniel Barreto, general manager of the mobile cloud business unit at Wyse. “With PocketCloud you have peace of mind, knowing that your files are safely stored on your personal mobile devices and computers rather than the public Web.”


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