Virtual desktop solutions and mobility

Several suppliers, including Citrix and VDIworks, have come forward to speak with me about work they're doing to address the inhibitors to deploying VDI-based solutions. Here are some of the issues these suppliers are addressing.

• Organizations have come to think that the only way to provide everyone with a high performance, rich desktop experience is to provide everyone with their own personal computing device (PC, Mac, Laptop, etc.) Even though many staff members would be well served by a virtual desktop solution, it's hard to break away from the status quo. In spite of this conservative stance, I've seen many announcements recently of financial services, healthcare and governmental organizations adopting this type of solution.
• Organizational decision makers are confused. Everyone who is offering a virtual access, application virtualization or virtual access/virtual processing software solution is using similar language to describe what they're doing. Even if a decision maker wanted to keep track of available technology, it would be very difficult for them to do so.
• Important members of the staff disconnect from the network to travel to events, customer sites or go to other company sites. These staff members often need access to applications and data. This one issue is often at the heart of an organization's decision to wait before adopting anything the comes close to virtual desktop solutions.

Up until very recently, the mobility issue was the hardest for suppliers to address. Virtual access solutions need some sort of reasonably fast network to access to the PC blade, server blade or general purpose application server. If the organization had deployed either virtual application environments or virtual machines supporting desktop workloads, the mobility issue could be surmounted. Most organizations, however, want to deal with an issue once and be done with it. Having to install three different types of technology and then choose among them on a case by case basis was just too hard.

I posted something on the work that Citrix has done earlier this week. VDIworks' roadmap has included dealing with the mobility issues for the past six months or so.

It seems to me that organizations would be best served by technology if they included the needs of their mobile staff members in their plans.