Omnissa unveils AI agents, Cloud PC, Elara governance

Omnissa's announcements at its Omnissa ONE 2026 conference in Orlando respond to a gap it says is widening: employees are adopting AI tools faster than IT departments can approve them. According to Omnissa's State of Digital Workspace 2026 report, usage of AI assistant apps across enterprise endpoints grew nearly 1,000% in 2025, with roughly three-quarters of that coming from unsanctioned tools. The company's Chief Product Officer, Bharath Rangarajan, framed the stakes by saying AI “is compressing the distance between insight and action,” and that companies need to see and control what AI is doing before granting it more autonomy.

The products themselves are split across two fronts. On the IT administration side, three new agents handle troubleshooting, application packaging and vulnerability remediation — the last working with Workspace ONE Vulnerability Defense, which Omnissa launched last year. That agent ranks vulnerabilities by priority and prepares patches, keeping a human in the loop before deployment, a design Omnissa ties to large language models accelerating flaw discovery and the time to exploit a flaw dropping below a day. Omnissa is also opening its platform to outside agents through a hosted server built on the Model Context Protocol, with limits set by the administrator's existing role and permissions. On the desktop side, Horizon Delegate runs inside an employee's Horizon virtual machine and can keep working after the employee disconnects, while Omnissa Cloud PC is a desktop-as-a-service offering that Omnissa runs itself, including the underlying compute plus its endpoint management and digital employee experience tools.

Elara addresses governance directly, pulling signals from systems that normally run separately so policies can be applied before consequential actions go through. Phil Hochmuth of International Data Corp. said the requirement now is for IT leaders to have clear visibility into human and AI-driven activity, with controls to govern actions at machine speed. How much this lands may hinge on adoption timing, since Omnissa gave no availability dates, and on Cloud PC's initial limit to Amazon Web Services Inc. before other cloud providers follow. Omnissa's history — spun out of VMware Inc. in 2024 after Broadcom Inc. acquired VMware and sold its end-user computing business to KKR & Co. Inc. for $4 billion — makes this a test of whether the standalone company can turn that inherited position into a broader AI governance story.