Processor Magazine is asking how small and medium sized businesses are challenged by laptop management:

Notebooks are outselling desktops. IDC reported that, for the first time in the U.S., notebook PCs outsold desktop PCs for all Q3 2008. We knew this shift was coming, but what does it mean for IT? What are the new challenges facing IT managers, and how will they change their approach to PC management?

Making laptops easier to manage is a key area of focus for us at Virtual Computer, and Dan McCall, our CEO, provided some insight, including expanding on the challenges faced, such as patch management and backup strategy for laptops. Dan notes that SMEs, in particular, need turnkey solutions for provisioning, patching, security and backup.

The great thing about the NxTop model of centralized virtual desktop management with distributed execution on traditional PC hardware is that it provides countless scalability and mobility advantages for large enterprises while also scaling down very nicely to accommodate smaller organizations that find the server-hosted desktop model too costly and complex.

Since announcing NxTop in September, we’ve been saying that our solution will change the face of PC management.  While there are a number of solutions for managing desktops, NxTop is unique in its ability to apply desktop virtualization to both stationary desktop PCs and laptop PCs to dramatically improve their manageability, reliability, and security.

We continue to talk with the press and IT community about NxTop, the technology behind NxTop and our mission to use the latest in virtualization technology (a type 1, bare metal client hypervisor) to make PC lifecycle management easier than ever, including for the laptop PCs that present so many headaches to IT professionals today.

One of our more recent discussions was with Enterprise Management Quarterly. Virtual Computer CEO Dan McCall provided his perspective on the challenges faced by IT staffs in managing laptops, how managing laptops differs from managing traditional desktops, security implications, the limitation of agents and more.

Here are a few quick excerpts:

IT Managers have begun to find that the same virtualization technologies that have revolutionized the way IT data centers are managed can improve the manageability, reliability and security of desktop operating system environments.  Right now, most desktop management is done using software agents within the operating system.  This approach has reached its limit in terms of both functionality and usability.

When time comes for an IT Manager to apply a patch to the desktop operating system, they need only apply the patch to the master virtual machine running on NxTop Center.  Once the patch is applied, NxTop Center seamlessly publishes the blocks of data that have changed to all NxTop Engines subscribed to that virtual machine.

Our most significant technology innovation is our patent pending approach for isolating the four main components of the PC: hardware, operating system, applications and user data.  Allowing each of these components to be managed independently is what enables us to give IT Managers scalable one-to-many desktop management without taking the “personal” out of personal computers the way that other desktop virtualization products have.

Read the full article at Enterprise Management Quarterly and if you have any questions on NxTop, Dan’s article or Virtual Computer, let us know in the comments below or on our forums.