If you’ve talked to a CIO lately, you’ve likely got an earful about having to support employee smartphones and the problems they bring — users sending off company files to Dropbox or their personal Gmail account or God knows where else. They loathe the idea that a user may be running Twitter or Scrabble on what they view as a piece of business equipment. If only there were a way to cordon off the personal from the professional …
Now, VMware and Verizon Enterprise Solutions say their newly released VMware Horizon Mobile service eases that angst. The news comes two years after the effort, called Project Horizon, was first announced. Two new VMware-ready phones — the Motorola Razr and LG Intuition — will run the new service with additional “VMware Horizon”-ready devices to come. And these devices running this service will bring fulfill “dual persona” promisew which segregates work email and access to applications from Twitter and Facebook.
According to the press release, those devices running in VMware Horizon Mobile environments provide:
” … a corporate workspace that is controlled and managed by IT, and is completely separate from the employee’s personal information, applications and data on the device. The workspace contains its own operating system, applications and policies, enabling IT to remotely manage the entire lifecycle of the workspace. IT is able to provision the workspace, deploy applications and monitor the flow of information to and from the workspace for security.”
According to a blog post VMware’s Srinivas Krishnamurti:
“Irrespective of who actually buys or owns the device, the corporation or the user, most employees tend to download personal apps onto these devices – Facebook, Angry Birds, Temple Run, etc. coexist with work email/PIM. It is fair to assume then that most devices will have both personal and corporate content (apps, data and services).”
A perpetual license for the service costs $ 125 per user.
Ah, Angry Birds and truly secure corporate email in one small package. If these devices deliver as promised, that is the best of both worlds — although one might quibble at the lack of immediate support for iPhones or Samsung Galaxies –both hugely popular among business users.
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