Unlikely partners team to present Desktop-as-a-Service on Google Chromebooks. Will pricing lure users to head faraway from Windows XP systems?

VMware has teamed up with Google to produce virtualized Windows desktops on Chromebooks. The move comes at a time when many enterprises, uncertain of what desktop to adopt next, have delayed moving off Windows XP or moving to Windows 7 or Windows 8.

VMware and Google executives claim companies can save $5,000 a head over other PCs with their joint arrangement. Which can entice the estimated 29% of enterprise users still running Windows XP. Microsoft has announced it would end technical support for XP on April 8. VMware and Google announced the partnership at VMware’s Partner Exchange show this week in San Francisco.

Windows applications haven’t previously run on Chromebooks, a skinny Web client whose slimmed-down Linux operating system was designed primarily to display feedback from applications running on Internet servers. It provides just the fundamentals: a browser, a media player, and a file manager. By teaming up with Google, however, VMware could make it easier for Chromebooks to display a virtualized desktop running on Horizon View 5.3-equipped servers, VMware’s desktop virtualization system. This sort of desktop includes Windows Office and other Windows-oriented datacenter applications as needed, giving enterprises a skinny client as a computer replacement.

VMware’s Sanjay Poonen, VP and general manager of end-user computing, said VMware and Google product teams got together two months ago, or shortly after Amazon.com’s plunge into its new Amazon Workspaces desktop-as-a-service (DaaS). Amazon announced in November that it’s going to provide virtualized desktops able to running Windows applications. That move could have jolted executives at both VMware and Google into action.

[Will virtualized desktops kill the computer? See Amazon Workspaces Speeds PC Demise.]

Poonen went out of his method to say that a joint customer, Softbank, spurred the move. “Softbank said we must always be working more closely and that brought us together,” he said.

Moving to Chromebook thin clients “brings a great number of benefits to both IT organizations and the users they support,” said Ken Miyauchi, senior executive VP of SoftBank, in a press release Wednesday. With virtualized desktops running on centralized servers inside the datacenter, IT not has to send field technicians out to work on end-user desktops or to update remote offices.

VMware and Google haven’t been engaged in such close cooperation before, and indeed have regarded one another as competitors for potential cloud services customers. But Poonen made it clear that they were leaving that past behind them. “Here is the 1st of many steps that we wish to do with Google,” he said.

Google want to see more corporate uptake of its Google Apps and Chrome mobile devices. An enterprise user pleased with access to Office applications on a Chromebook is a closer candidate to apply Google Apps out of the office, in comparison to one without a Chromebook.

Likewise, VMware has faced strong headwinds within the desktop virtualization market. In Google, it gets a tool, in addition to a partner with aspirations to supply mobile applications that still has a name for patience behind its Chrome OS operating system and browser. There are several Chromebook producers in addition.

Desktop-as-a-service on Chromebooks will initially be available on-premises to existing customers of Horizon View 5.3. It will be available from vCloud Hybrid Service datacenters “on the end of the primary quarter and beginning of the second one quarter,” said Poonen. It’s also available through VMware partner and vCloud Hybrid Corporation Navisite.

“When combined with VMware DaaS, Chromebooks can become powerful business tools for corporations that like to move to the cloud but are heavily invested in Windows environments,” said Sumeet Sabharwal, general manager of Navisite, a unit of Time Warner Cable. Google Chromebooks are thin and light-weight, but have laptop-like high-resolution screens. They’re less expensive, said Sabharwal, but in addition they “provide the mobility coveted by today’s enterprise users.”

DaaS on Chromebooks could be offered on a subscription basis. No pricing was included within the announcement.

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Charles Babcock is an editor-at-large for InformationWeek, having joined the publication in 2003. He’s the previous editor-in-chief of Digital News, former software editor of Computerworld and previous technology editor of Interactive Week. He’s a graduate of Syracuse … View Full Bio

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