February 27, 2025
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Kristina De Nike
Director of Product Management
Kristina De Nike is a Director of Product Management at Omnissa. She manages the team that is responsible for the Horizon Client and Horizon Agent, including the Blast protocol, which supports device forwarding and multimedia offloading. Kristina strives for data-driven decision making and clear user interfaces.
In March of 2023, the Horizon team announced we would transition off PCoIP in 2025. And by the end of this year, we will have removed PCoIP code from the Horizon Client and Horizon Agent. However, we will not remove the code until after the Horizon 8 extended service branch (ESB) release that ships around the end of 2025. If you are using an ESB, you will continue to get periodic security and bug releases for three years from the original ship date. You may also get updates from HP Teradici for client issues.
Moving forward with the Blast protocol
Blast protocol is a much better option for Horizon customers than the PCoIP code built into Horizon. This is true for both high-end graphics workloads and high-latency environments. We've heard great feedback from customers who have made the leap from PCoIP to Blast.
If you love zero clients for their security and ease of management, we have good news. HP Anyware added Blast as a protocol option last year for their Trusted Zero Clients. You can now use Trusted Zero Clients to connect to virtual desktops and apps on either Horizon 8 or Horizon Cloud on Azure. There are also Trusted Zero Client options from HP, 10ZiG, ClearCube, Atrust, Amulet Hotkey and NCS. For information on the Blast protocol, visit our Tech Zone, especially the Blast Extreme Optimization Guide.