I spent some time with our friends and partners CSC, both at their Aldershot UK headquarters and at VMworld Cannes. In case you missed it, we just announced a partnership around "CSC Dynamic Desktops" last month. The guys I met were real veterans of VDI, really sharp and above all, great guys to work with. Turns out, they built what had to be one of the first - if not the first - VDI implementation, over 2.5 years ago! (They did it prior to joining CSC.) To hear their war stories, both political and technical, it was truly an incredible journey. Just imagine if the guys who first invented the wheel met with such resistance:

• "Came up with idea for a better way to move stuff around. No one will give us any tools though, so we are using our fingernails to dig some curvy bits into a rock we found.
• Finished our curvy rock, needs some more refinement and funding so will present to the bosses later this week.
• Presented to bosses, they said they couldn't understand why this was any better than just having a bunch of servants carry things around. Servants are cheap, we need rocks to build huts, they said. Told us to go away.
• Decided to make our own tools out of twigs and twine, finally finished our first real prototype, made of wood this time. Much easier to work with than rock!
• Presented it again, bosses said they needed the wood for kindling, burned our thing that we called a "wheel" and sent us home again.
• Made another set of wheels, and demonstrated how it could carry a whole deer back to the camp with little effort. Now they want more wheels, and more deer."

Okay, it's a silly metaphor, but it's not much of an exaggeration for how much bootstrapping there seemed to be, and how uphill the battle was to get the concept off the ground. They've seen it all in VDI - as much as there is to be seen so far - and determined that Citrix has the right goods. Regardless, they have taken their considerable expertise to CSC. And CSC has selected Citrix as the partner to go to market with under the CSC Dynamic Desktops solution offering.  I really look forward to working with them and posting some of our experiences here.

I Calvin Hsu, Sr. Product Marketing Manager for Citrix Presentation Server, and I just wrapped up a visit to the UK and Southern France talking to analysts and journalists about Citrix views of virtualisation (I sticking with the Euro-spelling in the spirit of things) all layers of IT: apps, desktops, servers, storage...

The people that helped arrange meetings told me that people were pretty keen to sign up to talk to Citrix about virtualisation and get our perspectives on it. Some of that I attribute to just wanting to latch onto anything related to the topic, knowing that their readership would eat it up. No surprise there since it such a hot topic and a buzzword these days.

But there also seemed to be a genuine desire to hunt down meaning amongst the technical bits. Sometimes we get so involved in explaining the technology and in defining the nuances of how things work, that we lose a sense for why we care. know that I personally as a product marketing guy have been guilty of that - it a rut that easy to get dragged into, especially in crowded or emerging markets. Having been in and around virtualisation technology companies nearly 8 years now, I heard (and created so many technology-driven definitions of what the various flavors of virtualisation entail that it maddening.

So part of the mission of my trip was to get back to basics. Let talk about virtualisation, sure, but let not go down the death-spiral before we get it clear that the main reason anyone is interested in it at all is primarily because it does one basic consolidate. Consolidate servers, consolidate disks, and in the case of CPS, consolidate applications. It does this by separating the physical from the logical - but at the end of the day, the reason we care is because we need to consolidate.

This approach seemed to resonate with the people I talked to, because it offered a way to link virtualisation with consolidation of applications - which in turn supports strategic business initiatives like securing intellectual property and confidential data, outsourcing, business continuity, remote working, pandemic preparation, etc. That led to discussions about customer deployments and business value, rather than focusing purely on the IT operational challenges of configuration and networking and bandwidth...