VMware Horizon Mobile delivers BYOD functionality to Verizon in US

As the competition in the server virtualization market continues to heat up and the number of “unvirtualized” servers continues to dwindle, market pressures are forcing VMware to look outside its stronghold to other lucrative areas such as cloud and end-user computing.

Within the end-user computing market, a phenomenon known as the BYOD movement has flooded the workplace with user-owned iOS and Android devices. While many analysts and reporters have been preaching about the positive side of BYOD, many companies remain reluctant to let their employees use personal devices for work purposes — with good reason. There are a ton of security and privacy issues that go along with doing so, especially if an employee leaves the company.

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But VMware and Verizon’s Enterprise Solutions group announced last week that they have a solution to this problem.

In a joint press release last Wednesday, the two companies introduced the immediate availability of VMware’s Horizon Mobile solution, a dual persona offering available to Verizon enterprise customers.

The announcement is significant, as it is the first time VMware’s mobile software is being supported on a smartphone device in the United States. Prior to that, VMware made similar announcements with Spain’s Telefonica during VMworld Europe in October 2011 and with Japan’s SoftBank Telecom in November 2012.

VMware says Horizon Mobile takes a unique approach to separating a smartphone into two parts: one for accessing the corporate environment’s applications and data, and the other for accessing personal items, such as texting and playing Angry Birds. Other solutions on the market involve containerization processes, which may require modification to individual applications.

VMware, on the other hand, uses virtualization technology to wall off one user persona from the other. Because Horizon Mobile hosts corporate content in a complete operating system, IT administrators can control the workspace more tightly and efficiently. It also allows easier setup of policies governing what users can and cannot do while at the same time taking away some of the user’s angst by allowing the company the ability to remotely wipe only the corporate workspace environment.

According to Srinivas Krishnamurti, senior director of mobile product management at VMware, the usage paradigms have changed and IT needs to rethink security and manageability of mobile devices. Krishnamurti went on to state:

The old BlackBerry model of locking and wiping the device is no longer in line with how employees use their devices. IT administrators can now leverage VMware Horizon Mobile to isolate personal content from corporate content and only manage the corporate content on the device. The corporate content resides in a “workspace” whose lifecycle and usage is managed by IT. IT can customize what apps are in the workspace and what policies are applied to the workspace, provision the workspace to the user’s device over the air (OTA), and then manage its life cycle remotely.

But this announcement isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. One of the issues with VMware’s mobile virtualization platform is that it requires a specially modified version of Android to act as a host.

In other words, this technology won’t work on just any off-the-shelf Android device. VMware Horizon Mobile has a kernel module that remains dormant on the user’s device until they download a supported VMware Switch application from the Google Play store. Users then log in to the corporate environment with their corporate credentials, and behind the scenes IT can provision and manage the work environment with appropriate applications and policies.

What’s important to note in this latest announcement is that Verizon is installing the missing kernel module as part of an over-the-air (OTA) system update. Two of the carrier’s phones, the LG Intuition and the Motorola RAZR M, already have the update, making them the first Android phones on the Verizon service to be considered VMware ready.

VMware is currently working with Verizon to push software updates out to other Android devices on the carrier’s network in the coming months. VMware also said that a similar iOS version will be made available in the near future. These updates are going to prove important to VMware, because in a numbers game, these first two available smartphone models won’t make much of a dent in today’s BYOD demand.

VMware’s Horizon Mobile offering also solves another problem. Within the corporate world, Apple’s iOS currently has a market share edge over Android. One of the reasons for that is the fragmentation of Android. There are many different versions of the Android OS currently in use, and that means there would be a number of different variants of the operating system trying to access a corporate network. This fragmentation makes it difficult for IT organizations to put together a comprehensive security and manageability plan in support of Android devices. 

To respond to that challenge, VMware Horizon Mobile is said to leverage device virtualization in order to normalize that fragmentation. Afterward, it would allow IT to deploy and manage its own Android workspace that looks and behaves the same on any Android device.

Again, this is all good news for end-user computing. But is VMware’s technology taking too long to mature? After all, they company has been talking about it since 2008.

VMware dominated the server virtualization market by getting out in front of the competition fast and early and by working across multiple hardware vendors. That isn’t the case here. Within the mobile virtualization initiative, other big vendors are already pushing their own dual persona container technologies in the market, such as BlackBerry Secure Work Space, BlackBerry Balance, Samsung KNOX, and AT&T Toggle. Not to mention, Horizon Mobile is currently limited to one cellphone carrier in the United States. On top of that, VMware has mentioned nothing about tablet support — a fast-growing segment of the BYOD craze.

That said, it’s hard to take anything away from VMware. This latest Horizon Mobile announcement is a huge feather in the virtualization giant’s cap. With this announcement, the technology becomes more than just another slide in one of the company’s VMworld keynote presentations. After many years, it is finally available and being offered with perpetual licensing starting at $125 per user.

Is this the right answer? Can VMware live within the limited amount of CPU and memory on today’s smartphone? Is this price tag too high for what it provides? Will this be the holy grail of mobile endpoint management? What do you think? Sound off.

This article, “VMware Horizon Mobile delivers BYOD functionality to Verizon in US,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization at InfoWorld.com.