Any day now VMware will be making the HorKeep Calm Appsizon 6 suite of products generally available. We’re quite excited about the platform and new features here at Liquidware Labs—specifically VMware’s entrance into the world of hosted applications.

Which brings me to my point… End user computing and the next-generation workspaces that are emerging, are all about enabling users to have anywhere, anytime and any device access to … applications! It’s the applications that are driving the transformation. And related, VMware’s addition of hosted applications brings a whole new level of flexibility to the game.

With Great Choices Come Great Responsibility

So where do you begin? If you’ve followed my previous posts, you’ll know that I’m all about the transformational journey—not any one specific destination. Whether you decide a full virtual Horizon View deployment is in your future, or a managed image strategy with Mirage is right for you, Stratusphere FIT and Stratusphere UX will provide you with the visibility to help you ensure the initial and continued success of desktop projects.

Again, the on-ramp (where you begin) for your journey is unimportant. Stratusphere FIT can baseline and assist with the initial strategy; starting with a determination of those applications that are most important to your organization. From there, you can better understand usage patterns as well as those applications that serve the largest number of users (and those that may be important, but serve very few). Stratusphere will quantify the resources required to assist you in the design of your View or Mirage images, including details on the complexity of virtualizing specific applications. Not to mention, we’ll also help you to aggregate the associated workload and size the infrastructure investments you will be making.

For those already delivering virtual workspaces, Stratusphere UX will assist with a migration or upgrade effort, help to optimize your investment and enable to you to realize a strong ROI and TCO. Whether you’re planning a move from another platform, or changing from a View-delivered application to a hosted delivery approach, Stratusphere UX will provide you with the visibility to define an actionable applications strategy. Moreover, Stratusphere UX will serve as your user experience barometer; to validate, report, monitor, optimize and troubleshoot issues that will inevitably arise in the delivery of your next-generation work-space.

Ultimately, the Horizon suite provides you with options. And at the end of the day, these options will help you to balance the delivery of your applications. It’s about choosing the right delivery method for each application—with an eye on optimizing the delivery and maximizing the back-end infrastructure to support your applications strategy. We at Liquidware Labs are proud of our relationship with VMware and the role we’ve earned in supporting the Horizon suite. And with the new features soon to be released with Horizon 6, we look forward to supporting the continued successes of our shared customers.