Oracle, one of the few big IT companies that isn’t marketing some sort of tablet computer, nonetheless moved into the periphery of the genre with its July 6 launch of a new virtual desktop client for iPads.
Now available free on the App Store, the Oracle Virtual Desktop Client App for iPad provides access to virtual desktops managed by Oracle’s Sun Ray Software and Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. It is not designed to work with other VDI software, such as that from Citrix, IBM, VMware, Hewlett-Packard or Wyse.
The application works with a range of enterprise applications, including network-intensive applications and those requiring full desktop browsers. One example would be a mobile-computing environment for users of Oracle’s Siebel CRM, which is an application not previously known for its mobility.
It also is designed for uses such as hospital administration and enterprise resource management, Oracle said.
The new VDI application offers gesture-based and multi-touch operation with rich virtual-keyboard support that includes CTRL, ALT, ESC, Insert, Delete, Tab, Home, End, Function, Paging and cursor keys.
The application’s interface allows multi-tasking and seamless switching among other iOS applications, Oracle said. The Oracle Virtual Desktop Client uses Oracle’s ALP user-experience protocol.
The application is part of the latest version of Oracle’s desktop-to-data center virtualization software package, now in v3.3, which also was announced July 6.