Omnissa named Desktop as a Service Leader four years running

Omnissa has once again been placed in the Leaders quadrant of the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Desktop as a Service, our fourth consecutive year. We see this recognition as a reflection of what our customers and partners tell us directly: The Horizon portfolio maps to the business outcomes they're accountable for.

Recognition like this is built on work, and the twelve months between the last report and this one were among the most productive in Horizon Cloud's history. Two themes stand out: the question of where a Horizon desktop can run changed fundamentally, and running one got noticeably more efficient.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Desktop as a Service, Stuart Downes, Todd Larivee, Sunil Kumar, 5 August 2026.

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More ways to run Horizon than ever before

Horizon has always run on vSphere, and it still does—that remains a fully supported, first-class path, and it's where most of our customers run today. What changed this year is how much sits alongside it. Extending Horizon to additional hypervisors and clouds was our largest engineering investment of the year, and the result is that infrastructure is now a choice rather than a prerequisite.

Horizon 8 support for Nutanix AHV reached general availability in the 2512 release, with native provisioning and lifecycle automation across Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure. Adoption moved quickly, with hundreds of organizations joining the beta, and by April we were reporting production customers, including American National Bank of Texas, which consolidated its virtual desktop estate onto AHV rather than maintaining two platforms. We’ve since put the cloud-managed version into tech preview as Horizon Cloud on Nutanix, so the same infrastructure can be driven from the Horizon Control Plane.

A private cloud opened alongside it. Horizon Cloud OpenStack Edge entered limited release with the 2605 service update, supporting both community OpenStack and vendor-managed distributions, a meaningful option for sovereign cloud operators, service providers, and anyone with hard data-residency constraints. A separate tech preview with Platform9 Private Cloud Director brings live migration and high availability to private cloud VDI without proprietary hardware.

And in June, Horizon Cloud on Google Cloud Platform opened to public beta. Desktops run on your own GCP project with sole-tenant node support; we run the control plane. Workspace ONE UEM enrollment and Omnissa Intelligence telemetry are wired in from day one, so GCP-hosted desktops don’t become a separate island to manage.

Add the existing Azure, AWS, and vSphere paths, and the picture is straightforward: one console, one operational model, and genuine latitude to put each workload wherever it makes financial and technical sense.

Day-two operations got easier

Deployment flexibility isn’t worth much if the platform is fussy to run. Several of this year’s additions target exactly that:

• Self-Managed Pools let you bring existing desktops under Horizon Cloud brokering and management while keeping infrastructure and lifecycle control in your own hands, useful for staged migrations and for workloads that resist standardization.
• A simplified spare-capacity model arrived in 2606, replacing per-pool minimum and maximum VM thresholds with a single percentage set at the Pool Group level. Hand-tuning those numbers across dozens of pools has been a persistent source of both provisioning failures and unplanned spend.
• Live process visibility in Help Desk means an admin investigating a sluggish session can now see running processes, CPU and memory consumption, disk IOPS, and host utilization in real time, instead of asking the user whether it still feels slow.
• Cost Insights surfaces incurred spend, projected spend, and realized savings for Azure infrastructure inside the Horizon Universal Console, at deployment and pool-group levels—so you can confirm your power management policies are doing what you assumed they were.
• The Partner Admin Console gives managed service providers (MSP) and resellers cross-tenant visibility and role-based control from one interface rather than logging into each customer environment in turn.
• Linux desktops on Azure, including RHEL and Ubuntu Server in single-session configurations, mean developer and engineering workspaces sit alongside Windows in the same tenant, while Unified Access Gateway now scales to 4,000 concurrent sessions per appliance on Azure and AWS.

AI landed in the console, not the roadmap

Omni, our generative AI assistant, went generally available and now sits in the Horizon, Horizon Cloud, Workspace ONE UEM, Intelligence, and Connect consoles. It does two distinct jobs: answering product questions from Omnissa documentation and knowledge base content, and letting admins interrogate their own Intelligence data conversationally, ask how many sessions failed to launch last week, then open the result in Data Explorer to break it down further.

Alongside it, enhancements to Experience Management for Horizon reached GA with logon-time and last-mile network telemetry, guided root cause analysis, and software metering for license reclamation. Playbooks and QuickFlows turn those findings into remediation that runs against a device group on demand. For teams running disconnected on-premises pods, Omnissa Monitor provides equivalent operational insight without a third-party VDI monitoring tool.

Precision work and the identity layer around it

The Horizon 2603 long-term support release, covering both Horizon Cloud and Horizon 8, focused heavily on users whose work depends on what’s actually on screen. Visually Lossless and Forced Lossless Blast modes, EDID passthrough, and advanced color controls make calibrated display accuracy achievable in a remote session, which matters if you’re reading diagnostic imaging or approving a color proof. A new Horizon Agent for Mac extends the same remote access model to Apple hardware for Mac-based developers.

Security tightened in parallel: single sign-on for Microsoft Entra ID–joined desktops in Horizon Cloud, broader FIDO2 and WebAuthn support, anti-keylogging on Windows ARM, smart card authentication over TLS 1.3, and identity enforcement when SSO to a session fails. On the graphics side, Horizon now supports NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs and RTX PRO Servers, pushing workload density higher for everything from task workers to AI development.

What this adds up to

Most of the pressure we hear from customers right now traces back to a single problem: infrastructure decisions made years ago are now expensive to keep and expensive to leave. The work above is our answer to that. Move a workload to Nutanix or OpenStack without changing how you broker and manage it. Pilot GCP without abandoning Azure. Migrate in stages instead of all at once. Keep the console, the images, the app packages, and the user experience constant while the layer underneath changes.

That’s the thread we’ll keep pulling. If you want the fuller engineering picture from this year, our year in review for Horizon Cloud goes deeper on individual capabilities.

Everything above is what shipped. What comes next gets its first airing at Omnissa ONE in Orlando, September 28–30, with world tour stops in Amsterdam and Tokyo this fall. Expect breakout sessions on where Horizon Cloud goes from here, hands-on labs, and the customers doing this work talking through what actually happened when they moved. Registration is open.

Download the full 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Desktop as a Service report to see the complete vendor landscape and how we were evaluated.
 

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