[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2Pzqp8FxIM&w=560&h=315]

Just minutes after VMware made its big virtual desktop announcements at VMworld 2012, I caught up with one of the biggest voices in end user desktops, Brian Madden of brianmadden.com, for his take on VMware’s two biggest announcements.

Horizon Suite will manage Citrix XenApp applications

Horizon Suite is VMware’s platform to administer mobility, cloud, and BYOD. The big news is that it will also manage Citrix XenApp applications. That’s huge because that’s their big competitor, said Madden. XenApp is Citrix’s terminal server based solution for delivering Windows apps throughout the enterprise. VMware will be able to take existing XenApp environments and add them to the Horizon catalog. It’s a smart move by VMware. Unfortunately for Citrix, they can’t do the reverse. In the current battle between VMware Horizon and Citrix Cloud Gateway, VMware wins because it can manage all the VMware’s stuff and the Citrix’s stuff, said Madden.

Horizon Mobile – Hypervisor for Android and…

Horizon’s other big announcement was Horizon Mobile, which is currently a hypervisor for Android phones. Users can now have a personal and work virtual machine (VM) on their mobile device. However, it’s only Android based and not available on the iPhone. Apple won’t allow a hypervisor to sit under the iOS. As a work around, VMware had to do app wrapping, which puts their own application on the phone. From within that application, iPhone users can connect to other applications. VMware is not alone in app wrapping. They’ve got a handful of other competitors, said Madden.

Related Links

• VMWorld
• Brian Madden