Less than a year has passed since Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware in November 2023 and subsequently divested in the VMware EUC division, now rebranded as Omnissa Horizon, and many organizations are exploring alternatives for their Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) needs. While solutions like Omnissa Horizon have traditionally dominated the enterprise space by providing secure, scalable desktop environments, the shifting demands of modern organizations—driven by cost, flexibility, and the rapid adoption of cloud and hybrid models—are prompting a search for more agile platforms. The Leostream® Remote Desktop Access Platform is a powerful, cost-effective alternative, offering significant benefits for companies transitioning from Omnissa.
One of the most compelling reasons to transition from Omnissa Horizon to the Leostream® Remote Desktop Access Platform is the substantial difference in licensing costs. Omnissa employs a complex pricing model with various licenses and add-ons, each contributing to increased costs for features like Linux VDI, advanced security layers, or hybrid cloud management. Enterprises locked into Omnissa’s ecosystem may find themselves paying for capabilities they rarely use, driving up the total cost of ownership.
In contrast, the Leostream® Platform allows organizations to adopt a more flexible, pay-as-you-grow model. Instead of bundling features that may be redundant or underutilized, Leostream provides a modular licensing approach that lets IT teams add and remove features and integrations as needed. The ability to cherry-pick essential components gives enterprises more control over their VDI costs, helping them optimize resource allocation without sacrificing functionality.
For companies planning a phased transition, Leostream’s vendor-neutral nature enables smooth coexistence with Omnissa’s components during migration, allowing for a more gradual shift while managing expenses and operational risks.
Omnissa’s strength lies in its integrated ecosystem, but that same integration can become a limitation when organizations need greater flexibility. The Leostream Platform is inherently vendor-neutral, which means you can use it with various hypervisors, cloud services, and protocols without locking yourself into a single provider. This opens up possibilities to mix and match infrastructure based on your needs, cost targets, and performance goals.
Whether your enterprise wants to expand its on-premises infrastructure, migrate workloads to the cloud, or embrace a hybrid cloud model, Leostream’s platform enables seamless transitions. It supports AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and more—offering enterprises greater agility and freedom to negotiate cloud contracts that best suit their business objectives.
Moreover, the Leostream Platforms’s ability to manage virtual desktops across multi-cloud and hybrid environments without requiring extensive reconfigurations gives IT teams the power to leverage the best of both worlds—cloud scalability and on-premises performance—without vendor lock-in. This flexibility often results in significant cost savings and reduced complexity in managing cross-environment resources.
Managing an Omnissa-based VDI deployment can become complex, especially as organizations grow or shift their focus to hybrid environments. The more moving parts there are, the more IT teams need to invest in management tools, training, and expertise to ensure optimal performance. Omnissa’s proprietary ecosystem can lock teams into a specific operational workflow with a steeper learning curve for managing and scaling VDI environments.
However, the Leostream Platform offers a simplified yet comprehensive management interface that supports virtual and physical desktops across various environments. Its centralized control panel consolidates VDI, cloud, and physical resources into a single-pane-of-glass, making configuring and managing desktop pools, user access policies, and load-balancing features easier. The Leostream Platform’s powerful automation capabilities streamline provisioning and de-provisioning, ensuring that VDI environments remain agile and scalable.
By automating many day-to-day administrative tasks, IT teams can allocate more time to strategic projects rather than focusing on troubleshooting or micromanaging resource allocation. The platform also supports integrations with various third-party tools and services, further enhancing operational efficiency without additional software purchases or proprietary Omnissa solutions.
Security is non-negotiable in any VDI deployment, and while Omnissa offers a comprehensive set of security features, they often come at an additional cost. Advanced security options, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA) and Zero Trust architectures, are frequently locked behind higher-tier licensing packages, making them costly for enterprises focused on budget-conscious transitions.
The Leostream Platform embeds essential security features, including MFA, secure tunneling, and role-based access control (RBAC), as part of its core offering. IT teams transitioning from Omnissa can maintain or even improve their security posture while reducing the need for costly third-party security software. The platform’s native support for industry-standard security protocols ensures seamless integration with existing enterprise security frameworks.
For organizations that require strict compliance adherence, the Leostream Platform’s support for Zero Trust principles offers an additional layer of protection across hybrid and cloud environments. This security framework is critical for industries with high regulatory standards, and it ensures that enterprises can scale their VDI securely as they move beyond Omnissa.
Migrating from Omnissa to Leostream doesn’t need to be a full-scale, high-risk operation. Enterprises can take a phased approach, allowing both platforms to coexist during the transition. This strategy not only minimizes risks but also ensures continuity of operations during the migration process.
The Leostream Platform’s vendor-neutral and modular architecture means that organizations can transition specific workloads, departments, or geographies to the platform while maintaining existing Omnissa deployments for other parts of the business. This hybrid co-existence strategy gives IT teams the time and space to test the Leostream Platform’s capabilities in specific use cases, refining their approach before a complete transition.
Starting with non-critical or smaller workloads allows the IT department to familiarize itself with the Leostream Platform, ensuring a smooth and secure transition. Over time, as confidence in the platform grows, larger portions of the VDI environment can be migrated, all while keeping operational disruptions to a minimum.
Once the transition from Omnissa to Leostream is complete, the cost savings and operational efficiency benefits become more apparent. Enterprises typically see a reduction in licensing costs, better resource utilization, and a more simplified management structure that reduces the overhead associated with maintaining a VDI environment. The platform’s flexibility ensures that organizations are not boxed into a specific infrastructure setup, allowing for greater agility in responding to changing business needs.
Additionally, simplified desktop management, enhanced security features, and the ability to scale across multi-cloud and hybrid environments put IT teams in a stronger position to deliver more robust VDI services to end users. By shedding the constraints of Omnissa’s closed ecosystem, businesses can future-proof their VDI strategies and align infrastructure costs with real business needs.