Technology Meets Ideology in the Fight for the New Desktop

First Published on May 8, 2012 - 1,907 Views

On the eve of the Citrix Synergy conference in San Francisco, I thought I’d share a fascinating metric that gets to the heart of what is at stake in the desktop virtualization market.

A couple of months the I surveyed 101 members of the grandly titled Entelechy Associates Desktop Leadership Panel about their  post-Windows XP desktop management plans. The Entelechy Associates Desktop Leadership Panel is my network of desktop IT decision-makers that I survey on issues relating to desktop management, mobility, and application delivery in return for access to the index data behind my surveys.

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Developing a Remote Display Technology User Experience Benchmark

First Published on April 29, 2012 - 4,044 Views

25 years after X terminals pioneered the use of graphical remote display technologies, the industry still lacks a standard way of assessing the performance  of remote display technology protocols and associated endpoints. Standard benchmarking tools are readily available for all mainstream computing technologies, processors, GPUs, storage, networking, databases, Java, transaction processing systems etc. There is even a benchmarking tool to assess storage technologies for their ability to support VDI specific workloads (VDI-IOmark).

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Will Microsoft Windows 8 Software Assurance Fix VDI Licensing?

First Published on April 18, 2012 - 2,422 Views

No.

 

End of message. Seriously that’s all the blog post you get today.

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Some thoughts on the changing nature of the desktop

First Published on April 7, 2012 - 3,405 Views

This is more a little more ‘formal’ than my typical blog post, perhaps better to consider it a position paper under development than anything else, but you may find it of interest.

On August 12, 1981 Philip “Don” Estridge introduced the world to the IBM 5150 Personal Computer. At the time he shocked IBM executives by forecasting that that IBM would sell 250,000 PCs in three years, 10 times as many as IBM’s best-selling computer to date.

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The Five Tweets of VDI

First Published on April 7, 2012 - 5,401 Views

Tal Klein (@VirtualTal on Twitter) former Director of Technical Marketing at Citrix shared his views on VDI on Friday as part of a long running back and forth as to the value of this technology. He summed up his position as follows:

1 TS can be substituted for VDI in 80% of use cases
2 Hosted desktops of any flavor, TS or VDI (persistent or non-presistent) are not secure
3 Cost savings is the wrong reason to look into VDI It’s not cheaper Sorry
4 Microsoft licensing is a friggin mess Don’t trust VAR’s or SP’s: Involve an MS account exec before venturing into VDI
5 Anyone investigating VDIaaS should also look into TS DaaS and Intune

Well yes, but really no, sorry.

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Another Crack at Immanentizing the Eschaton*

First Published on April 1, 2012 - 1,252 Views

Clearly Microsoft hasn’t a clue when it comes to VDI licensing, but have you personally done anything to improve the situation?

How about letting someone know.

Microsoft’s head of licensing worldwide is Joe Matz,  his email address is jmatz@microsoft.com

Let him know how the needless complexity of Windows licensing is holding your business back. Explain to him how BYOD policies and COiT activities will make it practically impossible for you to maintain compliance with VDI licensing rules. Tell him how you would like to buy DaaS, but can’t find anyone who can afford to sell it to you in the way you want to buy it because they have to dedicate hardware to supporting you, and that having to buy and manage VDA licenses both cripples the inherent flexibility of DaaS and makes it more expensive than licensing a conventional desktop.  Tell him how this mess will accelerate your move towards commodity web services like Google Docs, where Microsoft doesn’t make any money.

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