Greetings from Chicago, where I am attending Brian Madden’s seventh annual BriForum event.  The event got off to a great start yesterday.  It is a smaller event as conferences go, but you won’t find a larger concentration of the brightest minds in desktop virtualization anywhere.  BriForum provides a great opportunity to see and touch some of the best virtualization technology available today, but I have been particularly drawn to some of the sessions focused on where this is all headed.  Chetan Venkatesh from Atlantis Computing did a really interesting session yesterday morning called “Envisioning the Desktop of 2015: A Tale of Three Clouds and Liquid Desktop Computing,” and Brian Madden and Martin Ingram of AppSense revisited their past predictions for the evolution of desktop computing in “Looking Towards the New Desktop.”  In both cases, the brand of client-side desktop virtualization we practice at Virtual Computer factored heavily into the presenters’ view of the future.

Walking around BriForum, one really gets the sense that there is a perfect storm of industry events brewing that is really going to cause desktop virtualization to take off in the next 12 months.  For example, all signs are that Microsoft “got it right” with Windows 7, and that its release will be a catalyst for many organizations to look for new and innovative ways to deploy and manage their desktops.  We think we have one for them.  If you happen to be a BriForum and would like to connect to see a live demo of NxTop, feel free to grab me by the shirt, ping me on Twitter (@dlane), or use the form we have available on our web site.

Fortunately for me, my time spent contemplating the future of desktop virtualization with really sharp people will not end with my departure from BriForum on Thursday.  I am excited to be teaming up with Rachel Chalmers of The 451 Group next week on the webinar, “Five Ways Virtualization Is Changing Your PC.”  It will be held next Wednesday (July 29) at  11:30 a.m. ET.  We will explore a number of the ways in which client-side desktop virtualization will transform the PC for both IT admins and end-users, including:

• The ability to run multiple operating systems on a single device and easily move from a personal to a corporate environment
• Easy migration from Windows XP to Windows Vista or soon Windows 7
• Enhanced data protection, backup and security
• Improved PC management for mobile and remote workers
• Remote desktop access to your documents, settings and self-installed applications

Visit our registration page to learn more or to register.

Since our company’s inception, we have been singularly focused on making PCs more reliable, more manageable, and more secure through the application of client-side virtualization technology. As IT folks try NxTop, they tend to have the “ah-ha moment” pretty quickly about how deploying and managing virtual desktops on a one-to-many basis will reduce their PC managements costs and improve their security. However, in the current economic climate buying decisions need to be made based on fact and not gut feel. As a result, we have spent a significant amount of time analyzing the key contributors to PC total cost of ownership (TCO) and exploring how the NxTop model stacks up against both traditional PC life cycle management tools and newer approaches like server-hosted virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

We look forward to opening up a more extensive public dialogue about our TCO findings in the coming weeks. As a first step, we are co-hosting a free webinar with IDC next week that will explore the TCO dynamics of desktop management in both traditional and virtualized PC environments. IDC analyst Michael Rose will review today’s desktop computing models and the TCO implications of each, and I’ll provide a brief demonstration of NxTop with a focus on the aspects of the product that have the biggest impact on TCO. I’ll also preview some of the early findings of our NxTop TCO analysis efforts.

The webinar will be held Tuesday, June 23, from 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM EDT. You can register to attend at:
https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/284181498

I hope to see you on the webinar!

Update: We recorded this webinar and it can be viewed here: Realizing the TCO of PC Lifecycle Management through Client-Side Virtualization (registration required).

Dan McCall, our CEO, contributed a guest post that appeared on David Marshall’s VMblog today.  In it, he explores some of the key questions that IT managers should consider when evaluating desktop virtualization approaches:

1. What are the real business drivers for desktop virtualization?
2. Do virtual desktops need to run on a server?
3. What about PC-hosted desktop solutions that already exist?
4. What will a mainstream desktop virtualization solution look like?
5. Will the end-users be happy with the solution?

Full post is here. It is an interesting read if you would like to understand more about what drives us here at Virtual Computer.

On the heels of Alex’s “Why Bare is Better” post last week, Yi-Jian Ngo of Microsoft is highlighting how “bare metal” client virtualization technology may be the key to driving mass adoption of desktop virtualization. Yi-Jian is the guy who takes startups like us by the hand and helps them navigate the waters at Microsoft, and it was great to finally meet him in person last week at VMworld. Yi Jian is discussing what he calls Desktop Virtualization 2.0 on his Core Infrastructure blog. In the post he discusses the two current definitions of desktop virtualization.

The first is what he calls “the model of virtual machines running in the bowels of the datacenter/cloud and projected out to users” – this is traditional desktop virtualization, or VDI. The second is where Virtual Computer’s NxTop is: running virtual desktops on the bare metal of a PC. Three use cases are mentioned:

The use cases for bare metal client virtualization are still emerging, though there are at least three that come to mind. One is the ability to deploy a locked-down workspace for corporate use side-by-side with a second workspace that end-users can modify but is walled off from certain resources, simultaneously maintaining ease of management while allowing some degree of end-user flexibility. Second is the quick deployment of policy-compliant workspaces to clients used by temporary or guest workers. And third is the offloading of certain utilities, particularly desktop security software, onto a separate virtual machine – possibly portending the arrival of desktop virtual appliances.

Absolutely right. We’ve been talking with hundreds of IT administrators responsible for PC management and find these to be among the top use cases for NxTop. It boils down to this: NxTop needs to make overall laptop and desktop management easier, more secure and quick to deploy. For the end-user, it needs to offer everything they’ve come to expect from a desktop experience.

My presentation from VMworld is up for anybody who wasn’t able to make it out to Vegas:

Let me know if you have any questions.

Peter Rawlinson at Virtual Strategy Magazine thinks something is missing from virtualized desktop solutions: the human element.  

Something is missing here.  Something that was not only present, but always intimately entwined in the PC.  Something that was essential to user acceptance of the PC.  We are talking here of the user, the human being, what can be referred to in technological terms as the ‘user personality’.  This is all the personal preferences that each user has that make their working environment their own.  Desktop wallpaper, resolution settings, keyboard, language and mouse settings, spell-checker, desktop icon location, personal applications etc. are all optional changes that a user can, and is fully expecting to, be able to make to the baseline configuration of their desktop.

I talked about this the other day and agree. The end user is an important element.

It’s been a few years since people started talking about desktop virtualization taking over the physical PC in corporate environments (I think it was 2005 that I first heard it was “just around the corner”). It hasn’t happened yet, at least widely. I have heard some quotes that up to 10% of corporate PCs are virtual PCs, though I think this is a gross exaggeration.

Why hasn’t this taken off yet? I think the answer is fairly simple: servers needed to be virtualized first, to give IT administrators and others the comfort level with virtualization technology, and that the overall technology — that is, the hardware — wasn’t ready for prime time yet. But now, two things have happened that make me think the virtual PC is finally “just around the corner” for many of us:

1. There is a high level of comfort with virtualization now. The technology is being used for core business applications in a wide variety of companies. Most IT personell now have at least some experience with virtualization and most executives are comfortable with the idea of virtualization.
2. Hardware has improved. Costs have come down for storage, bandwidth is practically a commodity, application vendors are updating licensing terms, physical PCs continue to get more powerful, etc.

Is desktop virtualization and the virtual PC really just around the corner? I think so. If I’m wrong about it today, I’ll look back in a couple of years and probably say the same thing!

As I noted yesterday, the Yankee Group reports that 72% of businesses either have deployed a virtualization solution or are planning to deply one. I think it’s clear that a majority of these businesses are talking about server virtualization — that is, server consolidation or test/dev or high availability or the like. Not many of those businesses are talking about desktop virtualization. At least, not yet.

Certainly, there are companies out there looking into desktop virtualization and there are definitely those that have already implemented it (I’d assume these companies are mostly running call centers at this point but I could be wrong). Desktop virtualization offers tons of benefits, many of which are similar to server virtualization: reduced costs and energy, greater security, etc. Of course, from what I can see, there are a lot of pitfalls in the current desktop virtualization solutions — hidden costs, tough virtual machine management, end user buy-in, high bandwidth and storage needs, etc.

As these pitfalls and risks are resolved, I see more and more companies looking into desktop virtualization as a real solution for their IT concerns. Once the right solution presents itself, there will be no stopping desktop virtualization. It’s just a matter of when.