Teradici Re-emerges as 'HP Anyware' to Replace zCentral Remote Boost

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https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/26/teradici_now_hp_anyware/

HP Inc.'s late 2021 acquisition of Teradici has borne fruit with the creation of a product called HP Anyware that will replace HP's own zCentral Remote Boost.

Teradici's flagship cloud access software (CAS) allows users to remote into PCs hosted on-prem or in the cloud. The acquired company made that possible using a protocol called PC-over-IP (PCoIP) that streams the contents of a PC's screen. No data from remote PCs ever traverses a network – remote users see only bitmaps. HP Inc. bought Teradici after betting the COVID-19 pandemic would make working remotely a permanent feature of modern life and deciding its own zCentral Remote Boost didn't offer it the best product with which to address the market. There's not much wrong with zCentral Boost, but it was designed to provide remote access to workstations rather than everyday desktops. HP Anyware gives the PC giant a remote desktop offering that can handle both.

As explained to The Register by Ziad Lammam, HP Inc.'s global head of Teradici product management, the first release of Anyware is really just a regular quarterly update to Teradici CAS. It's a significant release in that it adds support for Macs powered by Apple's M1 chips, which can now be accessed remotely from macOS, Windows, and Linux, as well as iOS and Android tablets. Some zCentral Remote Boost features such as accessing Wacom tablets have also made it across. A more substantial refresh will arrive in a September update that gives Anyware a new GUI.

Lammam said that by the middle of 2023, Anyware will be at feature parity with zCentral Boost – and development of HP's product will have stopped. zCentral Boost users will be offered security and functionality fixes, but HP's intent is for all users to migrate to Anyware.

The Register put it to Lammam that Teradici never set the world on fire: the likes of VMware and Citrix dominated desktop virtualization and are now being challenged by cloud-hosted desktops from Microsoft and AWS. Lammam replied that all of the abovementioned services support PCoiP, and AWS WorkSpaces are powered by the tech. But he also outlined HP Inc.'s plans to use Anyware as the basis for services offerings, rather than going head to head with cloud desktop or VDI vendors. Indeed, Anyware is run as part of HP Inc.'s services group, rather than its product teams. HP Inc.'s services team already offers endpoint management and security services that add value to its hardware. Anyware will also allow HP Inc. to offer remote PC solutions.

Teradici re-emerges as HP Anyware, will replace zCentral

Expect it to be bundled into managed desktop services from HP Inc.

www.theregister.com