VMware announces 'Dropbox for the enterprise'

Virtualisation and cloud infrastructure providers VMware have announced the next phase of their strategy for dealing with the post-PC era, including a ‘data as a service’ offering called Project Octopus.

Described as ‘Dropbox for the enterprise’, Project Octopus offers users a folder in which to store ‘unstructured data’, and from which to share it, either internally or externally.

VMware southern region SE manager, Tim Hartman, says Project Octopus will mean users no longer have to hunt for data, or clog up enterprise networks emailing large files.

"We’ve been running desktops for the last 20 years,” Hartman says, "so you had the device with an OS glued on top, apps bedded in, and your data on top of that – and if you lost your laptop, you lost your data.

"This is a fundamentally better way of managing unstructured data.”

The announcement comes as VMware introduces a new portfolio of management solutions, including VMware View 5.1, enhanced with a storage accelerator which caches commonly used blocks of storage to remove the data bottleneck, and Horizon Application Manager, VMware’s centralised engine which brokers access to applications, virtual desktops, and data resources.

"With Horizon Application Manager what the end user gets is a single view of all the apps they’ve got access to in terms of their persona, as well as where they’re accessing from,” Hartman says.

"There’s a new generation of people entering the workforce that are used to accessing data anytime, anywhere on any device. We’ve also got IT trying to manage all that in an easy way.

"If you look at [VMware’s] whole strategy it’s really to simplify the way we deal with desktops in the post-PC era, encapsulating the desktop itself in terms of VDI, encapsulating the application in terms of SaaS, and pulling that together in terms of how you broker a connection to a traditional or device-specific application.”

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