Last year, during VM2010, Dr. Stephen Herrod, CTO and Senior VP of R&D at VMware announced Project Horizon, a single-sign-on (SSO) portal for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), powered by the TriCipher technology, which VMware acquired around that time. Horizon is capable of federating SaaS applications with the on-premise Microsoft Active Directory service or other directory services and can be considered a key component of the long-term VMware desktop virtualization strategy.
In May this year, VMware released version 1.0 of the Horizon App Manager, the first product in the suite of product to be released under the Horizon brand. Horizon App Manager is a SaaS application hosted by VMware, sold on a per-user subscription. Using a so called Consolidated Horizon Connector, federation is accomplished. At that time cloudcomputing.info branded the solution 1.0, but as it turned out VMware released several updates branding it in a monthly release, the last update being in July this year.
During VMworld this year, VMware announced that Horizon will be extended to host virtualized Windows applications, which are virtualized by VMware’s application virtualization solution; ThinApp, providing a unified application catalog to end-users.
This new functionality will be available in beta by the end of the year.