Now, there is a transition under way (the cloud piece in the mobile cloud era) towards SaaS based productivity applications like Google Apps, which is why ChromeOS and the Chromebook exist in the first place. And, like it or not, most corporate customers are still relying heavily on the Microsoft Office suite to perform their day to day business. I don’t think the actual delivery mechanism matters that much, we are in the fast moving/changing mobile cloud era and device choices are fluid, what really matters is the application. The mobile-cloud era is all about letting billions of users consume IT as a Service, enabling access to any application, be it on-premises or in the cloud, from any location on any device. In the client-server era the focus shifted to decentralisation and powering a large number of different types of applications each requiring (or so the thinking was) it’s own silo. The mainframe era was defined by highly centralised, highly controlled IT infrastructures that were meant to connect a relatively small user population to a small number of applications (mainly data processing). If we look back (and generalise a bit) we can define two big computing architectures that defined IT in the past, these are the Mainframe era and the Client-Server era, more recently we are moving more and more towards a third computing architecture called the Mobile-Cloud era. So first things first, what exactly is the “Mobile Cloud Era”?

In this post I want to provide an overview of what this means for VMware’s customers. Yesterday at VMware’s Partner Exchange (PEX), VMware announced that it is joining forces with Google to modernize corporate desktops for the Mobile Cloud Era by providing businesses with secure, cloud access to Windows applications, data and Desktops on Google Chromebooks.

Chrome os vmware horizon client