Omnissa’s Horizon platform (formerly VMware Horizon) has been a prominent force in the VDI space and is known for delivering comprehensive virtual desktop solutions. However, as costs continue to rise and enterprise IT budgets are increasingly scrutinized, many organizations are seeking equally capable yet more cost-effective alternatives. The Leostream® Remote Desktop Access Platform is meeting this need with a powerful VDI solution that combines significant cost savings and flexibility while maintaining top-tier performance and functionality.
One of the most immediate benefits that Leostream provides over Omnissa is its licensing model. Omnissa Horizon requires a substantial upfront investment, with fees that can increase depending on the feature sets and support levels required by the organization. For example, some capabilities, such as enhanced security tools and automation, might come with added costs, particularly in larger deployments. Each component in the Omnissa ecosystem often has its associated costs, leading to a considerable financial burden for organizations with large-scale VDI deployments.
Leostream® Remote Desktop Access Platform, in contrast, offers a streamlined licensing structure that doesn’t hinge on locking customers into rigid feature sets. This flexibility allows organizations to scale at their own pace, only paying for the features they need. Leostream’s à la carte approach ensures that enterprises can tailor the VDI deployment to their exact requirements, avoiding the excessive and often underutilized feature bundles that come with Omnissa. This approach yields immediate cost savings by aligning your investment with your actual needs rather than an all-encompassing license that forces you to pay for functionalities that may not be mission-critical.
Leostream stands out with its vendor-neutral architecture, enabling IT administrators to mix and match hypervisors, cloud providers, and protocols. The platform supports integration with a wide array of hypervisors, including KVM, Xen, and even Omnissa itself, giving organizations the freedom to optimize their environments for performance and cost.
This flexibility is a game-changer for enterprises with diverse IT landscapes or those transitioning to hybrid or multi-cloud models. By allowing businesses to run VDI on a variety of infrastructure platforms, Leostream empowers IT teams to leverage existing investments in hardware, software, or cloud services. This reduces the need for costly vendor lock-in and fosters competitive pricing when negotiating cloud or hardware contracts, resulting in further cost reductions.
VDI environments are resource-intensive by nature. From storage and compute power to network bandwidth, the overhead required to maintain a large-scale deployment can significantly impact operating expenses. While Omnissa Horizon is feature-rich, some organizations report needing robust infrastructure to support optimal performance, which could add to infrastructure and maintenance costs.
Leostream’s platform, on the other hand, is designed to maximize resource efficiency. Its modular architecture allows IT teams to choose the best components for their specific use cases, whether on-premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid setup. The platform’s ability to scale horizontally means you can add capacity without overhauling your infrastructure or experiencing downtime. Furthermore, The platform’s intelligent load balancing and resource management tools help to minimize overhead, ensuring that your VDI infrastructure operates with the most efficient use of available resources. This not only extends the lifespan of your existing hardware but also reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) for your VDI deployment.
One area where Omnissa Horizon excels is its comprehensive management suite, but this often comes with a steep learning curve for administrators who are new to the platform. Managing a large VDI deployment can become increasingly complex as environments grow, particularly when maintaining updates, security patches, and user configurations across a diverse set of virtual machines.
Leostream’s platform simplifies management by centralizing control of all virtual machines, physical desktops, and cloud-hosted resources through a unified interface. This simplifies VDI operations for IT administrators, making it easier to manage desktops, pools, and session policies across multi-cloud environments. Furthermore, Leostream integrates with a wide array of IT service management (ITSM) platforms, reducing the complexity of user onboarding, offboarding, and resource allocation.
By eliminating the need for multiple management consoles and reducing the time spent on manual configuration, Leostream’s solution allows IT teams to focus on more strategic tasks, ultimately increasing productivity and further driving down operational costs. The built-in automation features for provisioning and de-provisioning VMs ensure that your virtual desktop environment can scale dynamically, reducing human error and saving on administrative overhead.
Security is a top priority for any VDI deployment, particularly in industries with stringent compliance requirements. While Omnissa offers robust security features, many of its most advanced security tools are only available at a premium price, adding to the total cost.
Leostream includes comprehensive security features without requiring additional costly add-ons. From multi-factor authentication (MFA) and role-based access control (RBAC) to secure tunneling for remote desktop access, Leostream ensures your virtual desktops are protected from unauthorized access. It integrates seamlessly with industry-standard security tools, allowing organizations to maintain high-security compliance while avoiding the excessive costs often associated with Omnissa’s premium security offerings.
Moreover, Leostream’s support for Zero Trust architectures provides an additional layer of security by ensuring that no device or user is inherently trusted, reducing the risk of breaches and data leaks. With these built-in security features, organizations can confidently deploy VDI solutions without investing in costly third-party security tools, further enhancing cost efficiency.
As enterprises shift toward hybrid and cloud-first strategies, quickly adapting to changing business needs becomes critical. Omnissa Horizon supports cloud deployments, but some organizations prefer more flexibility with their cloud and infrastructure options.
Leostream Remote Desktop Access Platform enables seamless integration with multiple cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, without locking you into a single vendor. This multi-cloud compatibility allows organizations to scale their VDI environments dynamically, optimizing workloads for cost and performance. By enabling IT teams to take advantage of cloud-based virtual desktops and applications when needed, The Platform reduces on-premises infrastructure costs and allows for more agile IT operations.
Additionally, Leostream offers the flexibility to move workloads between on-premises and cloud environments as business requirements evolve. This capability is particularly valuable for organizations that need to scale quickly or maintain business continuity during peak usage periods. This agility ensures that IT professionals can optimize their VDI deployment without being constrained by costly and rigid infrastructure setups.
The Leostream Remote Desktop Access Platform offers a cost-effective, flexible, and scalable alternative to Omnissa for organizations looking to modernize their VDI infrastructure. By reducing licensing fees, offering vendor-neutral support, and providing robust management and security features, Leostream helps organizations realize significant savings without compromising functionality.