I had a great time last week with Cisco doing the Desktop Transformation webinar, and an even better time afterwards talking to Cisco Distinguished Engineer Jim French about some of the more far-reaching opportunities that become possible when you start down a path to deploy VDI alongside Unified Communications. I’m looking forward to the day when I’ll be able to share at least some of the items we discussed.
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Cisco Opens 2012 Desktop Virtualization Push
I’ve already said Cisco will be the company responsible for putting VDI on the map this year, which could explain why I’ve been asked to fill the role of “industry expert” in the first of Cisco’s 2012 desktop virtualization webcasts. Far more important than me though there’s the opportunity to listen to Cisco Distinguished Systems Engineer Jim French and our Host and Director of Engineering, Jeff Platon; both of whom know far more about VXI than I’m ever likely to.
Embarrassing, but valuable nevertheless
Citrix screwed up recently with VDI-in-a-Box, creating a worldwide outage for every user of the product on January 1st. The proximate cause was a simple one, the Virtual Desktop Agent used by VDI-in-a-Box had a .dll which expired at midnight December 31st 2011 and the software wasn’t patched to address this. Like I said – embarrassing.
Now although it was a VDI product that had this problem wasn’t a VDI problem, it could have hit any product at all. I’ve seen it once before a few years ago and I’m sure it will happen again; people make mistakes.
2011 Review – Cisco
As I hinted in yesterday’s post, Cisco is in my top vendors list for the second year running. If you need the background on Cisco’s desktop virtualization ambitions, I covered the products and services in some depth here when Cisco first introduced VXI and more recently here when it announced its five-year technology partnership with Citrix in October 2011.
More important than shipping a compelling hardware platform, Cisco is building out a services team capable of designing, deploying and supporting end-to-end environments using either VMware View or Citrix XenDesktop – As I highlighted yesterday there’s a lot more to building a VDI environment than end-point, server, and connection broker.
2011 review – Citrix
Citrix had a busy year with notable acquisitions in the form of Kaviza, cloud.com and most recently App-DNA. Setting aside cloud.com as not being immediately relevant to desktop virtualization; in acquiring Kaviza and App-DNA, Citrix is directly addressing the two most important concerns that potential adopters of desktop virtualization have expressed – complexity and vendor maturity.
Joe Onisick highlighted this concern in a comment on my post on Cisco’s ability to create an inflection point in VDI adoption by saying
All the companies and tools you mention are great for VDI deployments, but is an infrastructure that requires 5-6+ vendors just to deliver a desktop really the house of cards you want to run your business on?
Microsoft’s Vision of the post-PC Future
A quick follow-up to last week’s post Defining the post-PC Era. Here’s a video that the Microsoft Office team released showcasing its vision for the future.
Set aside the infographics that might one day be part of office and look at the way that actions flow seamlessly between phone, tablet, desktop (both “PC” and actual desktop) …
Creating an integrated workspace that is centered around the user’s needs and informed by the capabilities of the device in use.
Events
The BrightTalk Next Generation Desktop Summit
VDI implementation makes a lot of sense for many organizations wanting to provide a secure and standard desktop for employees. But compared to other virtualization technologies, few organizations are deploying it. Why? Join this panel as they discuss this question, what VDI is lacking and what needs to happen in order for businesses to adopt it.
The Big BYOD Debate
Smartphones and tablets remain ever-prevalent, and the trend of employees using these devices for business purposes, whether sanctioned or unsanctioned, is on the rise. So Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies, and the way enterprise IT departments should handle them, is a topic that generates a lot of discussion and controversy. 
Access Recording >>
Cisco Desktop Transformation
