Omnissa: Nutanix Support Almost Ready, OpenStack Support in Sight

Contents

Omnissa, the former VMware division for End User Computing (EUC), has been on its own since July 2024, following VMware's acquisition by Broadcom. On October 7th and 8th, the company hosted the European edition of its in-house trade fair, Omnissa One, created last year, in Amsterdam, attracting around 550 participants. Omnissa's CEO, Shankar Iyer, who had already led the EUC division under VMware, opened the event's keynote with a presentation of the manufacturer's strategy in the post-VMware era.

In his view, the EUC market is currently characterized by an initially increased demand for digital work environments that create flexibility and support heterogeneity. Similarly, the call for sovereign services is growing louder, especially in Europe and the Middle East. And finally, the upheavals caused by artificial intelligence are a central factor, which the manager estimates to be significantly more comprehensive than the “mobile revolution” of 2007.

No “Licensing Maneuvers”

According to Iyer, these changes have been incorporated into the new version of the Omnissa platform, which was built with a microservices-based architecture. The architecture is intended to allow for efficient horizontal scaling, and the platform is also intended to impress with extensibility through open interfaces, high security, and meaningful AI integration. Under the hood of the new platform are the products and technologies that defined Omnissa under its previous owner—the VDI orchestrator Horizon and the device management suite Workspace One.

A few jabs at Broadcom's VMware and its controversial product and licensing policy were not to be missed in the keynote. Iyer said: “When we talk about technical consolidation of Omnissa products now, we don't mean a licensing maneuver where we throw a few products together and give the bundle an alphanumeric name. We are talking about products and services that work together as a solution.”

Patch Management for Workspace One

In fact, the manufacturer also had numerous innovations to offer in its platform: The Freestyle Orchestrator is intended to help simplify administration-intensive processes, such as those involved in onboarding users or devices. A workflow is supposed to handle this and save administrators manual tasks.

Workspace One, in turn, receives improvements in distributing new apps or patches with a phased deployment model, which is intended to securely automate the installation process. Workspace One is to receive its patch management, which will give administrators more control than the classic WSUS server or Update Client Policies.

More Support for Apple

In addition to support for Windows operating systems and, more recently, for Windows servers, CEO Iyer emphasized comprehensive improvements for managing Apple devices: “Over the past year, we have increased from a few DDM profiles to now several hundred for Apple operating systems, and we already support VisionOS and OS 26 from day one of their availability.”

Further announced features include expanded support for Android, a revision of printer management, IoT device management via the MQTT protocol, upcoming management of Windows servers, and a new version v2 of the in-house Enterprise App Repository, which will soon also support Mac and Linux.

Nutanix Support This Year

Regarding hypervisor support, the bombshell was dropped at the Nutanix manufacturer's conference in May that Omnissa, in addition to the previously exclusively supported VMware hypervisor, will support Nutanix's AHV hypervisor. With this open approach to its platform, Omnissa wants to help its customers build an “integrated ecosystem that is much more powerful than a bundle of individual products cobbled together.”

This approach is intended to enable customers to get the most out of their investment in this technology, rather than being forced into a closed platform with an expensive paywall—again, a small jab at the former owner. Omnissa intends to continue on this path by giving customers freedom of choice and flexibility. The previously announced support for the Nutanix hypervisor is now almost complete. Feedback in the beta phase has been very positive, and general availability of the feature is expected later this year.

In addition, Omnissa is currently looking at OpenStack as another upcoming platform, as many customers apparently are asking for integration of Horizon with OpenStack. Omnissa is working with Platform 9 on this, and a joint beta for OpenStack support is planned soon. Furthermore, Horizon's architecture is said to have been changed so that any other hypervisor can be used in principle via manual deployment of desktop pools—Hyper-V and OpenShift were explicitly mentioned.

Cooperation for Sovereignty

The final announcement of the in-house trade fair considered the new geopolitical realities—the Omnissa sovereign solution for workspace one. Omnissa developed this together with the Swiss company Gema International (not related to the German society for musical performance and mechanical reproduction rights). According to Ralf Gegg, VP of Sales for EMEA at Omnissa and a long-time manager of Horizon and Workspace One products, the company wants to meet European desires for transparency, sovereignty, and strategic autonomy, especially from US IT. Omnissa Sovereign Solution is already available in Austria and Germany, and support is provided exclusively by citizens of these countries.

The keynote concluded with further feature announcements on the integration of AI services. Omnissa AI Agentic Services are intended to implement agentic versions of existing Workspace One services to achieve higher automation; the manufacturer demonstrated this live using the example of vulnerability analysis with Workspace One Vulnerability Defense.

In conversations with participants on site, there was a high degree of satisfaction with the manufacturer's strategy—the path of emancipation from the former parent company VMware is being very positively received.

(mma)