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.

IT folks and end-users don’t agree on much, but they both share a common dislike of agents in Windows.  They are everywhere these days:

• Need to distribute software?  Install an agent.
• Patching?  Here’s an agent.
• Backup?  Agent.
• Security?  Used to be an agent—now it’s a six-pack of agents.

The purpose of Windows is to run productivity applications.  You deserve its undivided attention.  By moving management and security functions into a virtualization layer outside of Windows, NxTop creates an agentless PC management model that allows Windows to focus on what it was intended for.

In today’s corporate environments, PCs often start with a master image of the Windows operating system, but as soon as an individual begins using their PC the image takes on a life of its own. If you have 10,000 PCs, you have 10,000 variants of Windows.  Microsoft “patch Tuesdays” have become a dreaded pastime for many desktop administrators. Even though many utilize central patching tools, they never really know for sure what is going to happen when a patch hits a PC. In most cases, everything goes fine. However, in those cases when it goes badly, it goes very badly.

The IT pros we have spoken with have told us that a failed patch is often a desk side visit. This is painful proposition when it is a frustrated end-user down the hall. It’s a “career limiting” proposition when the user is the CEO in a hotel room in Beijing. NxTop takes the pain and risk out of patching in a couple of different ways:

• Instead of applying a patch to 10,000 divergent copies of Windows, the IT person applies the patch to a single Windows virtual machine that is not in use by an end-user. They test it. They publish it. That’s it.
• The next time the end-user reboots their PC, they boot into a patched image. They never saw or felt the patch. They still have all of their unique data and settings. In the unlikely event that there are complications with a system update (say, in a Beijing hotel room), the PC boots into the last known good configuration.

We are unique from many startups in that the problems we are trying to solve are not new.  The challenges and pitfalls of maintaining and securing PCs are well documented, and there are many existing companies attempting to tackle different aspects of the problem.

The advantage we have as a new entrant is that we are in no way limited by “the way things have always been done.”  Since we have no stake in the status quo, we bring an entirely fresh perspective, as well as an architectural approach that was not technically feasible prior to recent advances in virtualization software and hardware technology.

Over the next couple of days, I’ll post some thoughts on how age old PC management challenges can be tackled in a completely different way using NxTop, our PC management platform.

These thoughts are around the top five PC management challenges we’ve been hearing about:

1. Complex patch management
2. Too many agents
3. Flawed security model
4. Image bloat
5. Tough to recover from problems

(Note: This post has been updated with links to all five PC management challenges.)