Omnissa, VMware’s old end-user outfit, moves to manage servers and … Apple Watches?

And declares hypervisor independence after being tied to vSphere

Omnissa, the former VMware end-user compute business spun out last year as an independent company, is moving beyond its traditional territory of managing endpoint devices and into server management.

The company quietly released a beta of a Windows Server management tool in April and told would-be users it will allow them to provision and manage any Windows Server from 2016 onwards, compile full inventories of installed Server Roles and Features, and distribute software.

Omnissa senior VP for products Bharath Rangarajan told The Register the move into server management was requested by customers who like the company’s PC management tools and want to use them for more devices – including Apple Watches and Apple TVs.

Rangarajan said Omnissa is “working closely with Apple" to apply its management chops to the fruit company's consumer devices, as many frontline workers use Apple Watches to access corporate data or one-time passwords, and Apple TVs are increasingly prevalent in meeting rooms as they can run Zoom, a browser, or custom apps. (Apple management stalwart Jamf already offers similar services.)

Virtual reality devices like Microsoft’s HoloLens and Apple’s Vision Pro are also targets.

So are hypervisors other than VMware’s.

“We have built an architecture that can target any hypervisor,” Rangarajan told The Register, a major move away from VMware’s vSphere-only approach to its end-user compute portfolio.

“KVM is the most popular request we get,” Rangarajan said, adding that support for OpenStack and OpenShift are also on the agenda.

Customers want to run Omnissa’s wares on different hypervisors so they don’t get stuck vSphere silos, or because Broadcom’s massive price increases and licensing changes for VMware have given them a "higher urgency" reason to move.

And naturally, because we're at the peak of the AI hype cycle, Omnissa is working on a conversational chatbot that will handle requests such as identifying all endpoints running a certain version of an application, or allow admins to search the company’s knowledge base when they seek technical info. The bot, named “Omni”, will debut later this year.

Rangarajan said Omnissa is also exploring how to blend device management, employee experience, and security. That’s not buzzword bingo – he outlined a scenario in which Omnissa’s management tools would collect data about a user’s device, consider the risks it faces, and then decide whether to provision apps to the local OS or in a virtual machine.

Work is also progressing on the AI-infused workspaces the company teased last year, with that vision now encompassing automated provisioning, repair, and security.

The senior veep said AI will help Omnissa to determine which changes will be most impactful – for example by identifying which patches to prioritize during a change window.

“Patching with a lot of control is hard,” he said. “Not many organizations do it. “We want to help you fix things, not just tell you what is broken.”

Omnissa is ready to bring its new products to market, as since its July 2024 spinout it has implemented its own backend apps and is “99.9 percent carved out of Broadcom,” Rangarajan said. While the company has reduced its international presence from 40 countries to 16, he said it's appointed more channel partners to cover the gaps and is now free to work with consultancies that VMware may have eschewed due to competitive overlaps. Partners that repped a firewall vendor, for example, may have been bypassed because of VMware’s own (modest) firewall range. ®