Featuring WannaCry ransomware, VMware Horizon Cloud on Azure, Google I/O Android updates, Frame, and Gabe on his 20 years in IT.
Here’s what happened in enterprise end user computing, desktop virtualization, and mobility in the week leading up to May 18, 2017.
Next week is Citrix Synergy 2017, the ET6 Exchange conference, and E2EVC. Here’s where to find Gabe and me.
Following last week’s announcements from Dell EMC World, this week VMware announced that Horizon Cloud will support desktop and application workloads on Microsoft Azure. Gabe was shocked that VMware shifted their attention to Microsoft so quickly, but more importantly, he says it’s a solid move.
VMware also this week acquired Apteligent, the mobile app analytics vendor formerly known has Crittercism. Here’s are my thoughts, reproduced from my comment on Colin Steele’s blog post covering the news: This is definitely a nice to have, and it makes sense that monitoring and analytics would be part of the mobility management stack. On the other hand, it seems like a somewhat of new direction. It's more on the "things for developers" side than on the "things for EUC admins" side. (Of course, with acknowledgement that there can be a lot of overlap between these two sides.) For this reason, it makes me wonder what the underlying plan is. Could VMware be looking into some type of MBaaS? For years, we've batted around the idea of them acquiring an app refactoring platform a la Powwow or Capriza. For many of the same reasons, MBaaS would make a lot of sense on the roadmap, too. Consider me curious!
Frame announced that they’ve secured $16 million in funding from a mix of Bain, In-Q-Tel, and Microsoft Ventures. The company has been busy lately, expanding their focus beyond ISVs and Service Providers by adding in direct sales to enterprise customers. They are already seeing elevated interest from public sector, high security, and design firms. Until recently, Frame was based entirely on AWS, but now they also support Azure (who doesn’t these days?!). We’ll cover this more deeply in a few weeks, but operating on Azure gives Frame new capabilities. For example, Azure has more modern NVIDIA GPU support. Since you can manage desktops on both clouds from the same management console, customers now have more options that support more use cases than ever.
Google I/O 2017 is running this week, and while there’s not as much for the enterprise as there was back at Google Cloud Next ‘17, it is cool to marvel at all the artificial intelligence and augmented reality technology. Getting more to the point, there were two announcements for the EMM space: Project Treble is a way to make it easier for device OEMs to push out Android updates without having to do as much low-level work—good news for lots of reasons. Second, Google announced Google Play Protect, an app that surfaces built-in security features including Verify Apps (the built-in anti-malware that comes with Google Mobile Services) and Find My Device. For more, check out the Android Developers Blog post about I/0 2017.
The WannaCry ransomware outbreak obviously took up a lot of our attention this week; we didn’t have much more to add to the conversation, so instead we covered it by asking an open question: Will the WannaCry ransomware push your IT strategy forward? We got a few interesting comments—feel free to keep the conversation going by adding your own.
Jack: Will the WannaCry ransomware push your IT strategy forward?
Gabe: Holy smokes, I've been doing this for 20 years! This month marks my 20th year in IT, and the vast majority of that has been spent doing Desktop Virtualization.