In-Depth

What Is Omnissa?

• By Tom Fenton
• 07/18/2024

After much anticipation, VMware's End User Computing (EUC) division has emerged as an independent entity, now operating under the name Omnissa.

On July 1, 2024, Shankar Lyer, the CEO of Omnissa, formally announced that KKR had completed the acquisition of VMware's EUC division. This acquisition took over two years to complete, and the new company has over 4,000 employees.

What Got Acquired
Looking at Omnissa's products page, Horizon and Workspace ONE were the two big-name product lines that were acquired.

Horizon was VMware's virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) product and one of the world's most popular VDI/DaaS solutions.

Diving deeper into its web pages, we see that Omnissa also acquired VMware's desktop personal manager, Dynamic Environment Manager (DEM), application abstraction layer product App Volumes, and endpoint management solution Workspace ONE UEM.

Digital Employee Experience Products
Digital Employee Experience (DEX) has a chance to be the next big thing in the EUC. Omnissa is aware of this trend, and under its Solutions tab, it shows various Workspace ONE products categorized as DEX solutions.

Whereas many products monitor the metrics of the EUC infrastructure, virtual desktops, and endpoint devices that end users use, DEX is the natural evolution of this and is concerned with the users' actual experience. Omnissa is positioning itself to be a player in this growing field.

What Did Not Get Acquired
VMware's desktop hypervisors, Workstation (for x64), and Fusion (for macOS) were two products not included in the products acquired by KKR. It would have been interesting if they had been in the acquisition, as it would have given Omnissa a hypervisor platform from which to run virtual desktops. Still, it would have also made them a direct competitor to VMware.

What This Means to the EUC Community
Freeing Horizon from VMware will allow them to focus laser-like on EUC and pursue other interesting hypervisor platforms and technologies. They may also be able to partner with other companies in the KKR portfolio.

The two most interesting are WordPerfect and Parallels. I will give you that WordPerfect is a bit of a stretch, but if it could be bundled up with Horizon, it may make it attractive to those who are looking for a "good enough" office solution or a replacement or on-premises solution to Google Docs. Although WordPerfect has a small market share, it is still a major player in some industries, with law offices being chief among them. Throw in CorelDraw and Paint Shop Pro, two other Alludo companies, and it may be an interesting play.

The more interesting synergy is with Parallels, which can be seen as a competitor or as enabling technology to Omnissa.

On the competitive side, Parallels has RAS, its virtual application and desktop delivery product, which competes in the same market as Horizon.

They also have Parallels Browser Isolation, an enterprise browser that is gaining interest by displacing VDI and DaaS entirely, as some companies are moving to web-based applications and are eliminating the desktop altogether.

On the enabling technology side is Parallels Desktop for Mac and ChromeOS, which allows Windows applications, including MS Office, to run on devices running these OSes. Their ability to do this opens some interesting scenarios.

Going Forward
Now that Omnissa is "officially" separated, we will start to see what direction it will take, and Omnissa will host a web event dubbed "Omnissa Live" on July 23. This will be the first in a series of events where Omnissa will inform the EUC community about its vision and strategy as a standalone company. You can register here.