Preface

In the last few years, the market has exploded with new devices, applications, and services that have been focused on being easy to access and consumable with little technical knowledge. It's pretty much now become the norm to visit an online store, choose an application, and start using it immediately.

The traditional approach has been to deploy Windows on physical machines and use some form of distribution system for deploying applications and securing data. Users would be working from 9 to 5 in the office, physically sitting in front of their desktop PCs, and therefore they would consider it secure.

Corporate IT risks turning into a slow-moving dinosaur that does not contribute, but rather hinders innovation and the users' ability to be productive. Users are starting to avoid involving IT since it takes a long time to get anything done, and is slow moving. There is now a real threat that corporate IT becomes irrelevant and starts getting competition from these outside trends.

VMware has a track record in innovation, often where others get stuck. The origin of Horizon Workspace was a cloud identity services platform called MyOneLogin. It was developed by a company called TriCipher. TriCipher was founded in 2000 and acquired by VMware in August 2010.

Horizon Application Manager 1.0 was released in May 2011. This was also the first time that VMware unveiled their Project Horizon vision, with Application Manager being the first solution delivered against that vision. Horizon Application Manager was a user-centric management service for accessing cloud applications and included an identity-as-a-service hub that securely extended the users' existing identity, and allowed users to access web-based applications in a secure manner from any device.

Since the solution was still a cloud service, one of the top priorities for VMware was to convert it into an on-premise solution. (This was highly in demand especially by European customers who have strict data privacy laws.)

In August 2011, VMware released Horizon Workspace 1.5, and now customers could choose to install it on premise. During 2011, VMware acquired other companies such as Wanova to expand their capabilities. Horizon Suite 1.0 was announced in the spring of 2013. The idea with the Suite is that the customer could now buy one Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) to solve all their needs for end-user computing, from managing physical desktops to mobile management. The Suite includes Horizon Workspace, Horizon View, and Horizon Mirage, along with ThinApp, Workstation, and Fusion.