MokaFive’s VP of Marketing, Purnima Padmanabhan, and I enjoy conversations about technology, adoption patterns and what organizations really are seeking. Although I know that eventually the discussion gets around to what MokaFive is doing, I always enjoy the journey before we talk about such mundane things as a product announcement.
This time the conversation started with the industry confusion about desktop virtualization, the real reasons organizations consider desktop virtualization strategies, the growth in the use of Macs and how one trend can help smooth the adoption of the other. It was only after establishing that foundation that MokaFive’s “Mac in minutes” announcement was discussed.
Why is “desktop virtualization” so confusing?
What has been confusing in the industry discussion of “desktop virtualization” is that suppliers are offering a mix of four different types of virtualization to improve flexibility, reliability and efficiency of their customers’ client systems. Depending upon the goal they’re trying to help their customers achieve, they typically are offering one or more of the following technologies:
- access virtualization
- application virtualization
- processing virtualization
- management tools for virtual environments
These suppliers often use the same catch-phrase, “Desktop Virtualization”, when describing their product offerings even though they are targeting different customer requirements and offering different mixes of virtualization technology. This, of course, creates a very confusing environment.
What do organization’s really want?
If we speak to CIOs at different organizations, we’ll discover that they typically are trying to achieve one of three different results when they speak about adopting desktop virtualization. These results are:
- Reduction in desktop management costs
- Simplifying desktop changes during the life cycle of a desktop environment
- Simplifying the adoption and integration of new desktop devices and technology
This appears simple enough, but often decision-makers choose the wrong technology because they don’t have the time to wade through the marketing messages of 10 or 15 suppliers of desktop virtualization products to determine which of the alternatives is the best fit for them.
Add “bring your own device” into the mix
As staff members and customers increasingly use a mix of devices to access corporate applications and data, the murky waters become even more clouded. Rather than relying on the old standard, Windows, IT is seeing the use of Mac, Linux, Smartphones, and tablets increase. Although they would like to restrict the device choice to a few, well known and supportable options, they are finding that senior executives of the organization are the ones bringing in these devices and demanding full support when something goes wrong.
IT is caught in the middle.
Getting back to MokaFive
While the conversation was really interesting and what Padmanabhan had to say aligned well with the findings of Kusnetzky Group research, I was wondering when MokaFive’s announcement would become the central topic.
MokaFive is offering tools making it easy to deploy corporate standard Windows desktop software onto a Mac. The Windows desktop is encapsulated, copied to the Mac system and can be executed as if it were a traditional Mac application. The deployment of a complete Windows workload to a Mac environment can be accomplished in as little as five minutes. The workload would appear as an icon on the Mac toolbar.
MokaFive is making it easy to run a full Windows desktop environment on a Mac, allow Windows and Mac applications to execute simultaneously, update the environment when needed without causing a disruption, use a single image across Windows and Mac platforms, and make it possible for users to recover from viruses or malware attacks using self-service tools.
I was impressed how MokaFive was able to combine virtual processing software and a sophisticated desktop management environment to deliver a simple tool.
If bringing Macs into the IT fold is important to your organization, it would be worth the time to visit MokaFive’s website and review the product features and see the product demonstration.
