At VMworld® 2014, VMware, Inc. announced VMware Workspace™ Suite, a new integrated platform for managing applications, data, and devices. Available now, VMware Workspace Suite offers a single, integrated portal to access AirWatch® by VMware mobile and content management solutions, and VMware Horizon®. For end-users, the result is a unified experience across mobile and desktop devices, while IT gains a comprehensive management solution. In addition, VMware introduced new products and innovations designed to help customers begin their journey to the next phase of mobile work with desktops and applications delivered as a service.

"VMware Workspace™ Suite represents a key milestone, delivering the industry's best end-user experience in a single, virtual workspace that unifies mobile, desktop and data — allowing people to work at the speed of life," said Sanjay Poonen, executive vice president and general manager, End-User Computing, VMware. "VMware offers a best-of-breed and integrated solution that extends from the data center to devices, to make this end-user computing suite both simple and more secure for line-of-business and IT."

VMware Workspace Suite offers many innovations that benefit customers challenged by the complexity of deploying and managing multiple point products. Key differentiators of the solution include:

Seamless, Anywhere Productivity with Single Sign-On: Access to web, SaaS and Windows applications using mobile devices requires only one touch since they reside in the VMware Workspace Portal and appear in the AirWatch application catalog.

Scalable Unified Platform for Hybrid Clouds: The VMware advantage provides a unified platform that can monitor and automate resource management across private and public clouds using VMware vCloud® Automation Center™ and VMware vCenter™ Operations Manager™ to enable the highest service level agreements.

Trusted, Best-of-Breed Technologies:Combining the leader in virtual desktopsⁱ, VMware Horizon 6 and the overall "Top Player" in Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM)ⁱⁱ, AirWatch by VMware, VMware Workspace Suite delivers a solution that is trusted and proven with global customers.

"The cost and complexities of managing mobile users using multiple devices are challenging IT departments everywhere and IT administrators are looking for solutions that can make it simple for themselves and their users," said John Jackson, research vice president, Mobile and Connected Platforms at IDC. "A solution that can seamlessly deliver this securely and at scale is what vendors and customers are after and VMware Workspace Suite is a compelling offering."

New products along with enhancements to VMware Horizon will help customers adopt desktop virtualization at scale. These innovations can help eliminate the tradeoffs between performance and costs that customers may have experienced in the first generation desktop virtualization implementations. Updates to the VMware desktop product portfolio include:

Real-Time Application Delivery with CloudVolumes:The addition of CloudVolumes offers real-time delivery of applications, user settings and data to any virtual desktop, enabling customers to deliver personalized desktops with the economics of a shared infrastructure. Combined with VMware Horizon, it provides endusers a personalized, mobile-like experience, while offering IT organizations the greater simplicity and lower costs associated with stateless environments in their data center or the cloud. 

High Performance Rich Graphics Applications on Chromebooks:The collaboration between VMware, Google and NVIDIA offers a technology preview of high-performance, workstation-class applications and desktops accessible from Chromebooks. This will expand the hardware options for customers with demanding visual computing needs so they can select their system of choice. Combining NVIDIA GRID™ virtual GPU (vGPU™) in the data center, NVIDIA Tegra® K1 processors in Chromebooks, and the next generation VMware Blast Performance will deliver a smooth and power efficient virtual desktop experience.

Applications-as-a-Service with VMware Horizon® DaaS®:This solution is the only 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.

Desktop as a Service European Expansion:VMware Horizon DaaS will be available to global customers in the U.K. and a third desktop service option, VMware Horizon DaaS Enterprise will offer high performance DaaS environments to a broader set of user profiles.

"VMware virtual desktops have helped our company consolidate IT support, save costs and better serve our worldwide employees and customers," said Amrith Nambiar, vice president, Information Technology at ServiceSource. "After evaluating other solutions, we chose VMware Horizon because of its unique capabilities and we have been delighted with our decision."

Introducing Project Meteor, a Technology Preview: VMware also demonstrated Project Meteor, a technology preview showcasing next generation desktops and applications as a service. Unlike the current desktop virtualization solutions which simply lift-and-shift the desktop management problems from physical PCs to servers in the data center, this technology can create personalized desktops with a user's applications and data, dynamically using any generic available virtual machine. In addition, Project Meteor will then deliver these end-user resources in seconds to any device with an HTML5 based browser. This will offer a mobile-like experience in its speed and personalization, while offering the agility and anywhere access of the cloud.

This article was originally posted “VMware Releases VMware Workspace Suite” from Cloud Strategy Magazine.