‘There’s a lot of room in this for partners to not just expand, but also differentiate,’ said Renu Upadhyay, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Omnissa.
Renu Upadhyay, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Omnissa, the spin-off of VMware’s end-user computing business, wants partners to see its App Volumes application management tool as a way to reach more holistic engagements with customers–especially with the vendor’s plan to introduce full app life cycle management for physical devices later this year.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based EUC vendor is investing across its product portfolio as a parade of vendors compete over customer virtual environments, with companies including Red Hat, Nutanix and Microsoft looking to take market share from legacy providers such as VMware and Citrix.
“There’s a lot of room in this for partners to not just expand, but also differentiate what they offer,” Upadhyay said. “That’s the beauty of this–it’s a big enough problem that there’s a tremendous opportunity for partners.”
[RELATED: Omnissa, The Former VMware EUC Business, Launches New Partner Program]
Omnissa App Volumes
Omnissa has thousands of partners worldwide, according to the vendor. Omnissa became independent of VMware and VMware parent Broadcom in July 2025 after investment firm KKR bought the business for about $4 billion.
App Volumes’ ability to run on infrastructure by the likes of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Citrix–tougher to pull off during Omnissa’s days with VMware–should mean more flexibility and choice for partners working with a customer with a variety of IT environments with physical and virtual endpoints, Upadhyay said.
Bryan Parks, a national EUC solutions architect at New York-based Presidio–No. 24 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500–told CRN in an interview that virtual desktops infrastructure (VDI), desktops-as-a-service (DaaS) and the virtualization market have seen increased demand as organizations that quickly scaled remote workforces during the global pandemic now face a refresh cycle.
App Volumes is best of breed for ease of use, on-demand capabilities and ability to work with non-Omnissa products, Parks said.
“If I was a Citrix client, I would still use App Volumes to manage my applications,” Parks said. “Any environment that I have–AWS, Google Cloud, on-prem, AHV (Nutanix’s Acropolis Hypervisor)–once that gets all added in there, you remove the control plane from IT’s responsibility to manage and update. That’s a game changer.”
App Volumes’ writable volumes capability is a differentiator when working with developers who need to produce code for applications to suit a variety of browsers, for example, he said.
Looking ahead, as Presidio moves customers to Microsoft’s Windows 11 operating system–Windows 10 end of support comes in October–Parks said he would like to see Omnissa abstract App Volumes further and allow IT to capture apps on multiple OSes.
Here’s more of what Upadhyay had to say about enhancing App Volumes.
What do you want partners to know about the latest version of App Volumes?
The main challenge that our solution is addressing is really the app sprawl.
There are lots of teams dedicated to doing just this. And this problem’s not going away. We’re going to multiply the number of apps. It’s going to double (by) 500 million-plus. It’s a staggering number.
If you don’t have the latest version of an app or there’s some patches and you don’t deploy it fast, it gets incredibly complex and leads to security issues.
(App Volumes is) really about (partners) thinking with their customers how to problem-solve for outcomes. And that’s what we see is the biggest opportunity for our partners.
(Value-added resellers want) to have the conversation more broadly in understanding–what does your app estate look like? What are the Windows applications you have? How many versions do you have? How do you manage those images? How long does it take for you to roll those out?
To really do assessment-related services … to really understand the problem statement and to highlight the app sprawl and the complexity for the customers that they serve.
Once they do that, they can then offer a much more holistic solution that goes across the full life cycle of the application.
They can say, ‘We now do this not just for your virtual estate, but we can also extend it to your physical devices.’ And GA (general availability) is later this year. But we have launched the beta of it.
It goes from a very narrow product–single type of estate use case conversation–to a much broader conversation. Customers can decide, ‘Great, I like this. I want to do it in house. And I can free up my people to do other things because you’re saving me time and money.’
Or they could say, ‘I would like to outsource this fully to you from an MSP perspective.’ In which case, MSPs then have a more efficient way to do it.
You can deploy those apps 90 percent faster. There’s a very strong efficiency from an IT resource perspective, whether it sits with the customer or it sits in a service provider. It makes them much more efficient. They can do it much cheaper. It reduces management costs by almost 50 percent.
How will you continue to innovate App Volumes looking ahead?
We (have) laid out our vision for the autonomous workspace. And we think about how we’re deploying that from an endpoint perspective–where we can spot issues ahead of time. We can remediate it. We can provide root cause analysis.
We want to extend all of that to the app life cycle as well. Really understand how employees are using their apps. Are they using their apps? If there are issues with it, how can we remediate those proactively? How do we surface that information ahead of time? Showing usage patterns.
There are a lot of IT dollars spent on apps and app utilization. That’s a pretty big chunk of the budget. (Partners) can be a lot more efficient in the management of those apps. They can remediate issues. They can show security teams the ability to track–are you on the latest version? Have you remediated patches? Are you compliant from a CISO (chief information security officer) perspective? We’ll continue to iterate on that.
Our goal is to provide a consistent experience across physical and virtual (endpoints). From an IT perspective, they can apply consistent policies. They can be agnostic about what type of endpoint the employees are accessing.
From an employee perspective, they can be agnostic. They can say, ‘I’m working remotely. I’ve launched into my virtual desktop. I’m on vacation, and I’ve just launched that–versus (being) in the office and I’m using my physical machine. They have a consistent experience as well.
How is the AI era and agentic AI era affecting Omnissa’s products?
Every app that they(enterprises) deploy now has some AI embedded in it. There’s the responsible usage of that AI in terms of–when you bring (an AI) copilot inside, are you making sure that no data is getting leaked?
When you’re running certain kinds of queries, (are you) making sure that you’re not putting it into a public LLM (large language model)? There’s a lot around the security and privacy of how AI inside of these applications gets used, but then making sure the application itself gets rolled out to the employees in a secure and consistent way is a very fundamental first step.
How we use AI inside of our products is–we have visibility around this application. We know what image of the operating system is there. We know what version of the application exists. We know what latest patches need to be deployed. We use all that data to alert the IT admin.
When they go into the console, the first step is just churning through that data and flagging any alerts. Then we advise the IT admins, ‘We’ve noticed these anomalies.’
And then how do we get to that remediation–eventually, maybe do it on your behalf, if a level of comfort is reached.
Taking the human out of the loop in remediation–does the technology need more work, or is it more of getting users to trust the automation?
It’s a trust thing.
When large customers with complex environments want to roll out something as simple as patches, it’s not like, ‘Hey, everyone, go in and install the latest (version).’ They don’t roll those out at scale.
IT admins are involved in that because they don’t know what it’ll break. They use these deployment rings to roll out, and they test.
If I do something autonomously without the human in the loop at the app level, could it break something else in the experience when there are so many variables to it? That’s why this environment is so dynamic.
That’s why for us, simplifying this complexity is such a strong value proposition. For us and our partners.
If partners can engage with the customers on their app journey, if they can engage with customers to understand what their vision is, that’s just a tremendous opportunity for partners to build on this conversation, to be a lot more of a thought partner, a trusted adviser, than (a reseller).
How’s the competitive landscape for Omnissa?
When you think about the full life cycle of the application–even we were playing only in one part of it.
When a customer is looking at, ‘What do I need for app management?’–there was always a mix of solutions. From the smallest companies to big companies, everyone provided a piece of the puzzle.
When we take an approach to solving a particular problem, we always anchor it back to our platform. The goal is to provide a solution that’s comprehensive but also inclusive.
We know customers have deployed different parts of the application management stack. They may have smaller players they’ve already invested in.
We are unique in that we can do this across virtual and physical (endpoints) because the depth and breadth that we have on physical is unmatched. That in itself is an abstraction of complexity for the IT admin.
If (IT administrators) have a very point solution for a particular piece as part of the virtual environment, we can integrate. A platform approach means it has open APIs (application programming interfaces).
Our ability to run not just our own infrastructure, of course, but also run it on AWS (Amazon Web Services) infrastructure (or) Microsoft or even Citrix.
Providing flexibility and choice is also something that’s unique because most solutions tend to be vertically integrated and stacked.
IT environments, they’re complex. They could be vertically stacked. And then (a customer acquires) a company, and now they need to accommodate a whole other stack of technology.
Our platform approach gives us the ability to span the breadth, but also to plug in to the environment that companies already have.
The technology we provide … not just separating the app from the image but then attaching that app on demand is unique to us. That does not exist in the market.
You open up your device, you see the icon to the application, but it doesn’t physically reside on your device. When you click on it, it’s streamed. That saves infrastructure costs at the back end. That makes it faster to deploy the application. You always have the latest version because it’s not actually downloaded, so to speak, or installed on your machine.
How about Omnissa’s competition in the virtual desktop infrastructure market?
It’s really in terms of making sure for customers, whether they want to deploy in the cloud or on the premises. That is part of our strategy.
We were a little limited (while part of VMware and Broadcom) in terms of the hypervisor support that we had. But we announced upcoming support for Nutanix AHV. We have the beta going on.
It’s all upside for us in terms of providing flexibility and choice to customers. And then the app management problem–VDI addresses certain specific use cases, but also the ability for admins to now take it up the stack from desktops into application but then also do it across physical (endpoints).
You can also manage virtual desktops from our UEM (unified endpoint management) platform, from Workspace One. Providing that integration is unique.
The identity services that are common across the board, the data lake that’s common across the board–allows us to deliver those value added (services).
(The portfolio) was more finite, I would say, because of where we came from. But there’s a lot more opportunity to broaden now, whether it’s across hypervisors, whether it’s across clouds and environments. We make those decisions on our own.
The Horizon portfolio overall continues to be a strong value proposition for us going forward as well.
Are you seeing customers looking to consolidate vendors?
What we had a while ago–everyone had to have a cloud strategy no matter what. Then you saw people dial back. Then it was cloud plus hybrid, on premises. So everyone has an AI prerogative right now. Everyone has to go and figure out some investment in that.
And then the macro environment is forcing everyone to do more with less.
How do you free those dollars? You could keep doing what you’re doing, and you could have multiple siloed solutions, which means it’s very hard to have talent that can cross between those.
I probably need to make sure I have IT staff to manage all of (those solutions). Or if I invest in a partner, I’m paying those dollars to the partner. Is it useful for the partner to have five, six different (solutions)? How much staff do they need?
Standardizing on a vendor or consolidating to that platform approach at least takes away some of that because you then just need someone who can operate that platform. Automatically, you freed up resources.
If IT can then focus on that end (user) experience, that means less help desk tickets. That’s another area where there are cost savings that are possible. You tend to have a much more holistic conversation if you think about the full end user estate.
How important is the channel to Omnissa looking ahead?
They are extremely critical. (For) the value proposition that I’m presenting, I’m relying on our partner community to be able to take that to the customers. But in a more holistic fashion.
The partners’ value add is to surround it with–what kind of assessment can they do for their customers? What kind of recommendation can they make? How do they then deploy? Then how do they ensure that the customer’s experience is successful holistically?
That’s when, for any SaaS (software-as-a-service) product, you end up with a renewal. It’s extremely important for us for partners to understand that they are playing in a real market opportunity that has real challenges.
How they create their offering to go after this problem statement in a holistic fashion to their customers is really unique. And partners can differentiate based on other additional value-added services they want to attach. So no two partners need to be the same. They can differentiate based on deployment services. They can differentiate based on additive security. They can differentiate based on assessment services.
That’s the beauty of this–it’s a big enough problem that there’s a tremendous opportunity for partners.
That’s how partners can grow and be a lot more profitable with those services offerings.
