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Spurred on by recent discussions about whether civil servants should be used IE6 when the world+dog has moved on to newer, more secure platforms, I wondered if there wasn't another way around the problem of getting applications to the end user, a costly process that involves time-consuming and thorough testing in order (as one commentator has already pointed out) to reduce the load on the support desk.
Written by Manek Dubash, Contributor

Spurred on by recent discussions about whether civil servants should be used IE6 when the world+dog has moved on to newer, more secure platforms, I wondered if there wasn't another way around the problem of getting applications to the end user, a costly process that involves time-consuming and thorough testing in order (as one commentator has already pointed out) to reduce the load on the support desk.

I was talking recently to Centrix Software, which has developed an application delivery platform. All applications can be delivered to the user via the browser, no matter what the back-end is -- from VMware VDI to Citrix XenApp etc.

No enterprise-owned applications sit on the users' hard disks, which has the side-benefit of reducing the number of licences you need: ten Photoshop users don't need ten licences when the applications are delivered from a central point, as it's unusual for all 10 to be running the application concurrently, so you might be able to chop the licensing bill in half.

It's not the only one out there -- Tibco does something similar and on a larger scale -- but it is, in my view, a good example of how to circumvent many of the problems of application delivery.

And all end users need is a browser. Isn't this where we came in?

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