Amazon announced the launch of a new marketplace for desktop apps on the Amazon Web Services Marketplace, enabling users to find and buy desktop applications for Amazon WorkSpaces. Virtual desktop customers of Amazon WorkSpaces can access it, and find over 100 apps in eleven categories. You pay by the month for any app you use.

The company also announced Amazon WorkSpaces Application Manager (Amazon WAM), which packages and delivers apps to WorkSpaces so they run as if they were natively installed, but are controlled by IT admins. This makes for simplified maintenance and auditability, according to the company.

“Today, many companies deploy a mix of upwards of 200 software titles to their desktops,” Amazon says. “This requires them to invest in infrastructure to manage their applications and track usage, which adds cost and complexity. Further, it is difficult to manage upgrades and retirement of applications when they are no longer needed. Amazon WAM makes it easy to manage and deploy these applications on-demand and at scale. With Amazon WAM, administrators can build and curate a selection of desktop applications, and then control which users have access to them. Users can then select and install only the applications they need, and administrators can track usage in real-time so they only pay for what their employees use. In addition to selecting applications from the AWS Marketplace, businesses can upload their own line of business applications and control employee access to them.”

“With just a few clicks in the AWS Management Console, Amazon WorkSpaces customers are able to provision a high-quality, cloud-based desktop experience for their end users at half the cost of other virtual desktop infrastructure solutions,” adds Gene Farrell, General Manager of AWS Enterprise Applications. “By introducing the AWS Marketplace for Desktop Apps and Amazon WAM, AWS is adding even more value to the Amazon WorkSpaces experience by helping organizations reduce the complexity of selecting, provisioning, and deploying applications. With pay-as-you-go monthly pricing and end-user self-provisioning of applications, customers will lower the costs associated with provisioning and maintaining applications for their workforce.”

Here’s a glimpse of the types of apps you can expect to find in the marketplace:

The marketplace and WAM aren’t the only new AWS offerings. The company also announced that it’s giving developers its machine learning capabilities with a new Amazon Machine Learning service, which includes APIs and wizards to guide them through creating and tuning machine learning models. More on that here.

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