Omnissa: Coming Soon

During the Omnissa ONE 2025 keynote, someone mentioned to me how the majority of the slides had a "coming soon" tag.  What they found frustrating was not only that there was little already released being talked about, but all of the coming soon sides did not even give an idea of how soon! No idea if they were releasing in a matter of days of the event, some this calendar year, some a bit further out. They found it frustrating, and initially, I agreed with them.  From there, the inside joke of the conference became coming soon.

However, after talking to some of the Omnissa product leaders and other peers, I began to see coming soon from a different perspective.  

Good bones

Think about every "good" HGTV show where they are they are doing a full remodel on a house. Before you get the glitz and glam of the gourmet kitchen, or the dream master bath, they must fix the bones of the house first.   Things like wiring, plumbing, and even the foundation if left original will not support the upgrades and it is best to replace it all before you start building the new.  All of this is hidden behind the walls and floors and not visible to the eye but makes everything else work the way it should. 

Now you won't have to worry about that brand new kitchen that cannot simultaneously make your avocado toast in the toaster while blending your smoothie in the blender without blowing a breaker.  Or even worse, having your new walk-in shower drain back up the first time you use it and the bidet at the same time.  Coming soon is what happens you've done the hard work to get here.

So, what foundational components did Omnissa upgrade to enable coming soon?  Let's take a look

Modern Stack (aka ModStack)

You've probably already heard about this one before, but you probably didn't realize how important it was. One of the first projects that the Omnissa team identified as a limiter to future growth and capabilities was the cloud backend of their Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (formerly Airwatch) platform.  The ModStack project was identified as a crucial step to remove limitations that hindered future growth and capabilities.  By modernizing the underlying infrastructure, ModStack enables Omnissa to deliver new features and improvements more efficiently, providing a solid, scalable base for upcoming innovations and visible enhancements across the platform.

• Re-architecture of the Workspace ONE UEM backend to a modern SaaS architecture to eliminate legacy limitations and enable faster innovation
  • Changed from a monolithic on-premises-based architecture to a microservices-based cloud native architecture for high performance, scalability, resilience, and rapid feature delivery
• Native Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning (AI/ML) built into the platform
  • Artificial Intelligence was developed a core common service across the platform, not just as a bolt-on afterthought.  This ensures that crucial capabilities such as guided root-cause analysis, anomaly detection, and risk analytics can be used by all features to optimize security and enhance user experience.  And set the foundation for Omni AI assistant to be integrated across the platform
• Desired State Management (DSM)
  • DSM ensures devices comply with organizational policies by regularly assessing and enforcing required applications and configurations
  • It compares each device's current state to the desired configuration and takes corrective action when needed to maintain compliance, improve security, and streamline device management
  • The transition to a SaaS model enables faster and more predictable policy enforcement
• Enhanced the Apple Declarative Device Management (DDM) integration to leverage the Apple GitHub repository to automatically import configurations into the UEM platform without requiring platform version updates
  • This enables desired capabilities such as day 0 support for IOS 26 without any upgrade required

Intelligent Hub

Now that the backend was updated with ModStack, the next step to complete the transformation was with the agent on the client side, the Intelligent Hub.  The Omnissa Intelligent Hub fulfills a dual role of providing the modern management across nearly any device, while also delivering the unified app portal to the user's applications delivered by Workspace One Access. 

When it came to the management of Windows devices, the Intelligent Hub leveraged a Microsoft technology called Open Mobile Alliance Device Management (OMA-DM) to provide key functions such as device enrollment, configuration of Microsoft Configuration Service Providers (CSPs), registry settings, and permissions.  Other functions were handled by Omnissa-developed AirWatch Cloud Messaging (AWCM) scripts and sensors, baselines, application catalog, and provisioning.  This worked well when designed however it had 2 key limitations:

1. OMA-DM only allows for 1 modern management platform to be registered
   1. This means that Workspace ONE could not manage a device managed by Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Configuration Manager (SCCM), or any other 3rd party management software
2. OMA-DM was not supported on Microsoft server operating systems
   1. This limited Workspace ONE to only client operating systems for device management

So the Omnissa team went back to the drawing board to come up with a rebuilt agent.  The goal was to develop one that was no longer dependent on 3rd party services and built to easily integrate other Omnissa technologies.  Make it into a one agent to rule them all, if you will, enabling them to reduce agent sprawl within their solution sets.  With this newly rebuilt agent, Workspace ONE now has these highly anticipated new features:

• Windows Advanced Management (formerly as co-management)
  • Workspace ONE can now be installed alongside any other Modern Device Management (MDM) platform and can extend them by enabling the Workspace ONE advanced features.  This may be a temporary solution while migrating from the legacy platform to Workspace ONE, or they both can be used at the same time to provide needed capabilities such as:
    • Deliver App Volumes Apps On Demand packages to physical and virtual endpoints
    • Detailed reporting on device and application usage
    • Leverage Digital Employee Experience (DEX) data and Workspace ONE Intelligence for deep insights into the end-user experience
    • Feature-rich remote support across all devices with Workspace ONE Assist
    • Utilize Freestyle Orchestrator to create user onboarding workflows to enable users to be productive faster by streamlining setup tasks into a user-oriented and context-aware experiences experience
• Server Management
  • Workspace ONE adding support for Windows Server management now enables IT admins to manage their Windows servers with the same platform as they do desktops, laptops, and mobile devices.  From a single pane of glass, it will be possible to:
    • Enroll a server into Workspace ONE
    • Deploy configurations and group policies object (GPO) administrative templates (ADMX)
    • Add or remove Windows server features
    • Deploy applications and updates
    • Manage Windows updates
    • Remotely administrate the server
• Windows Multi-User Support
  • Workspace ONE Multiuser support changes from managing the entire device with one set of policies and applications no matter what user logs in, to one where settings can be applied to the device and/or users.  Now an individual user 's applications, permissions, and other settings can be unique to them and have no impact on any other users who share the same device.  This enables devices to be shared between users, floating virtual desktops in Horizon to be managed by UEM, and assigned user in the UEM console to accurately display the last user logged in.
• Horizon Management
  • Workspace ONE can now be used with Horizon to manage persistent virtual desktops and applications and in the future can be leveraged to automate the provisioning of virtual desktops and pools using Freestyle workflows.  This means that finally you can deliver the operating system and applications using the same tools and processes across physical and virtual desktops.

Horizon provisioning

Omnissa's Horizon was integrated with VMware vSphere for many years as the only hypervisor of choice for on-premise deployments. With the advent of Horizon Cloud and support for workloads in Azure, the first new hosting provider was added to the fold, but only in the cloud. Over time, additional providers were added to Horizon Cloud, such as Amazon Workspace Core; however, on-premise remained with only 1 choice outside of manual pools (no provisioning or power management).

After Omnissa spun out into its own independent company, the demand for additional hypervisors rapidly increased as customers either wanted to migrate off of Broadcom's vSphere or to diversify their platforms and avoid vendor lock-in.  Nutanix AHV was the most in demand, with others such as Red Hat OpenStack, Hyper-V and more in the "nice to have" column. 

To support Nutanix or any other hypervisor, the Omnissa developers had a challenge. The entire provisioning process, from the GUI to the code was written only to support vSphere provisioning.  Instead of taking the direct route, writing a new provisioning engine and workflow for each new hypervisor, they thought ahead for how this should work going forward. 

• First, they wrote a new hypervisor-agnostic provisioning engine and workflow for Horizon that incorporated everything you've come to expect from a Horizon pool, from defining the master image, pool creation and clone naming schemes to power management profiles. This engine defines everything you need to build and manage a Horizon pool, but it does not specify how it gets deployed to the hosting infrastructure.
• Then, they wrote a translator that takes everything from the provisioning engine and translates it to the commands for the hosting infrastructure. First, of course, is Nutanix AHV. This calls on Nutanix for things like clone and snapshot support, communications for machine power on/off, deletions, etc.

This modularized approach to provisioning now means that to add additional hosting platforms, Omnissa needs only create a new translator for each. Updates to support new hosting versions and features are also simplified, as they only need to be added to their specific translator, which speeds up maintenance and testing.

As a result, expect to see a faster cadence for new hosting platforms and updates in the future.

Walk This Way

You can learn more about our team's take from Omnissa ONE 2025 by watching the recording from our Walk This Way Live from Omnissa ONE.  It is safe to say that coming soon was mentioned more than once!

Moving faster

The roadmap for Omnissa's upcoming releases has never been bigger. To get a picture of this, simply look at the change logs (excluding bug fixes) since Omnissa became an independent company. The number of changes is increasing with each release, solidifying the idea that Omissa is Coming Soon!