On Day 2 of VMworld 2012, Project Octopus got a new name. VMware’s under-development collaboration tool was unveiled this week as Horizon Data, a key component of a new integrated management platform that brings together a number of different projects the company has been working throughout past few months.

During an interview in May 2011 VMware CTO Mark Herrod made a point about his company’s mobile strategy being too fragmented, and this is the big deal for the VMware Horizon Suite. It is the sum of Project Octopus, Project Horizon, Project AppBlast and a number of other specialized solutions that aim to be the enterprise’s go-to destination for BYOD, providing an interface for the admin to tailor mobile services for their organization. At the heart of this is Horizon Data, which gives the company control over the information, workers can share across mobile devices and desktops.

“Through a central Web management console, the VMware Horizon Suite enables IT to customize a service catalog for all company data and applications. Horizon Suite will understand a user’s attributes and environment (device, location and connectivity level) and then enforce policies across applications, data, and devices. This will make it possible for you to deliver Windows, Android, iOS, web and SaaS applications in a single workspace and give your users self-service access to applications and data from anywhere.”

This debut is coupled by another big update, this time coming from the direction of Hewlett-Packard. The hardware giant optimized its Converged Cloud portfolio for the 5.1 release of vCloud Suite 5.1 unveiled at the gathering: virtual hosts can now be added in just minutes within HP environments, no reconfiguration is required to import a VM into a CloudSystem, and a feature called HP Cloud Maps for VMware automates application and service deployment. Finally, data protection has been upped as well with support for the PCI DSS security standard and a re-optimized version of HP Data Protector.

HP is not the only one that’s integrating its solutions with VMware. Also this week, the virtualization giant announced that it’s beefing up its software-defined network strategy via a partnership with Riverbed. The WAN optimizer’s Stingray, Granite, and (most notably) Cascade software will be coupled with products including vFabric Application Director to boost VMware’s SDN offering line-up.