With less than a week to go until VMworld, life has been pretty exciting around the Virtual Computer offices as we put the final polish on our latest NxTop product functionality demos.  Today, the excitement level reached a fever pitch, as we announced our new “Get Smart About Desktop Virtualization” program that will formally kick off at VMworld.  The “Get Smart” program will highlight how a PC management approach that leverages client-side virtualization provides significant cost-saving benefits versus both server-centric virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) models and traditional agent-based PC management approaches.  The best part is that when the dust settles, one lucky IT professional will walk away with a cool new car that is….well, smart!

The “Get Smart” program will feature a number of activities at VMworld where attendees can learn about NxTop’s unique PC life cycle configuration management capabilities, as well as interact with some of our key partners who help bring it all together.  The more you interact with us and our partners, the more chances you will have to win the car.  Keep reading the blog and come by and see us at Booth #1940 next week to get all of the details, including some “extra credit” opportunities for all of you star pupils out there.

Travel budget blues keeping you away from VMworld this year?  There are still plenty of opportunities to get involved.  In conjunction with the “Get Smart” program, we have launched a new online community site that includes a very nifty total cost of ownership (TCO) calculator.  The tool is highly configurable, so if you don’t like our cost assumptions, simply plug in your own.  Think our overall methodology is flawed?  Stop by the forums and say what’s on your mind.  While you are at it, sign up for one of our upcoming webinars on “The New Economics of PC Management,” which will provide another chance to see NxTop in action, along with an in-depth review of our TCO methodology.  Online forum contributions and webinar attendance will earn VMworld attendees additional chances to win the car and provide those playing along at home with a chance to win.

Stay tuned more more contest details as VMworld gets under way.  See you in San Francisco!

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.