Pressing its case that the desktop is moving away from the center of computing, VMware Chief Technology Officer Steve Herrod gave attendees at the annual VMworld conference here today a glimpse at a technology the company is developing that will let workers access Windows applications regardless of the type of device they're using or the operating system it runs.
Herrod built on the post-PC era theme VMware's Chief Executive Paul Maritz laid out in his keynote address at the conference yesterday. Herrod showed off technology from VMware's labs, some of which is being released today, that lets corporate tech managers simply provision applications--such as Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet software--to employees to use on iPads, Android phones, as well as their Windows desktops.
"The world has changed," Herrod said of the era when IT managers doled out applications to PCs, which were then handed to employees. VMware is introducing technology that lets those manager "apply policy based on humans rather than devices," Herrod said.
VMware updated its Horizon Application Manager, which had only let users run cloud-based applications, to support Windows applications regardless of the type of device or the underlying operating system. Herrod also demonstrated ThinApp Factory, which lets employees pick among the applications that their tech departments make available to them. Companies can stitch those together with VMware's Horizon Mobile to make those applications easy to use on portable devices. And VMware announced that devices running Horizon Mobile will be coming from LG and Samsung, among others, in the coming months.
Herrod also previewed VMware's Project AppBlast a service that promises to deliver any application, including ones created for Windows, to any device supporting HTML5. And he demonstrated Project Octopus, a service that synchronizes data to enable collaboration over any device. He didn't disclose when either project would be available.
