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Welcome to Desktop 2020! This is a blog to discuss where the desktop is going over the next 3-5 years. Whether you are a tree-huggin' Mac-head, a Gates groupie, or a "just give me a Terminal Window" Linux lover, this is your place to pontificate, elucidate, or proselytize (or just read and shake your head in disbelief).
Seeing as this is a Citrix blog, it's going to be no surprise that I will be taking the DaaS/SaaS position but that still leaves a lot of latitude for user experience/OS/TCO discussions. Well, the discussion has to start somewhere so here's where I'm coming from...
I gotta start from my own experience, that being with my Lenovo laptop. You know the old Amex tagline "Don't leave home without it"? Well that's me with my ultraportable. It's light enough to come with me everywhere; I can type on it in coach and it has enough guts to run all my apps. Here's the thing about it though: I actually had zero choice in laptops when I joined Citrix; it was this PC or nothing. I just got lucky this time around. I used to worry that if the screen started getting pixel cancer, I would end up with the boat anchor discarded by my VP when he got his MacBook Air (wait for a later post on "Laptop Bling"). Salvation has come in the form of a BYOPC program that Citrix announced last year. This means that, if my personal (oops I meant corporate asset) laptop dies, I can go buy something similar and get reimbursed. I won't be allowed go to IT for hardware support but, frankly, I have never done that anyway. So, making the big assumption that the program doesn't get turfed by the Bush-economy, I am good to go. I think that this is a growing trend. Why put a bunch of expensive, super-depreciating assets on the company books if you don't have to?
What will make BYOPC work properly for those who are not keen on re-imaging hard drives? You need to deliver a centralized corporate desktop to the employee-owned laptops. Hard thing to do when you are in an airplane a lot like some folks. What works for me is this idea of dropping a client-side hypervisor on my laptop, allowing me to swing between corporate image and personal OS installation on the fly (on the net or off). (I'll save the Type 1/Type 2 debate for some other time.) I figure this is the best of both worlds. I can download a movie to watch in Coach Class and pause it to update a PowerPoint in the corporate image (I put this in for the boss!). The method to deliver the corporate image and the OS type is kind of up to the IT department. Frankly I wouldn't care much as long as the corporate desktop isn't a real pig. When you look at this from a dollars and cents perspective, it probably works for the company too since besides not having the assets on the books, you don't have to maintain dozens of different OS's and apps on dozens of different hardware configs. I've seen some numbers from analysts and IT departments and it represents some serious dinero.
Personally, I am going to stick to the ulta-portable with whatever Windows version I am keen on at the time. Citrix has a tech preview of the Citrix Receiver for the iPhone. No question it's cool but, as much as I like mine, I figure I can take a minute to boot up my laptop to edit PPTs. I am thumb-typing well enough to answer emails with "OK", "Yes", or even, "Can it wait until next week?" but I am probably using my laptop for most emails too.
Bottom line is that choice is a good thing. Give me endpoint independence. I probably spend more time with my laptop than my family; don't make my laptop an arranged marriage. The technology is here to support employee-owned laptops; the ROI looks pretty good and ALL THE COOL COMPANIES are doing it!
Comments (8)
Apr 10, 2009
Anonymous says:
So who is the masked man/woman behind "desktop2020"? What Citrix group are you i...So who is the masked man/woman behind "desktop2020"? What Citrix group are you in?
Apr 21, 2009
desktop2020 blog says:
I'm on the cleaning staff. We read everyone's emails at night. A lot of time on ...I'm on the cleaning staff. We read everyone's emails at night. A lot of time on my hands .....
Apr 10, 2009
Anonymous says:
Are we talking what's mainstream in 3-5 years or what all the cool companies are...Are we talking what's mainstream in 3-5 years or what all the cool companies are doing?
I think that personal VDI will be mainstream in most companies in 3 years and that most employees have some client side hypervisor installed. Most software vendors will still not have modified their license agreement or licensing towards personal vdi where it's actually in two places. Software asset management becomes harder and most "installations" will have a timelimit. Client hardware/software will need to be supported by all major vendors (so that a Mac user or a BSD user isn't prevented in using their prefered flavour of OS/hardware.
Strong encryption will be standard to protect the corporate images against viral attacks. Viral authors will attempt to infect these personal vdi's through the hypervisor and some will succeed.
Apr 12, 2009
Simon Bramfitt says:
When I heard about Citrix's BYOPC initiative, I was less than convinced. Withou...When I heard about Citrix's BYOPC initiative, I was less than convinced. Without raking through the coals, my concern boiled down to 'Unless the device is managed how can you be sure it is patched, has up-to-date AV signatures, has a fully effective malware protection system installed etc.'
The shift towards 'you can BYOPC but you have to run this corporate guest VHD to access anything on the intranet' (YCBYOPCBYHTRTCGVHDTAAONTI for short) changes everything. As I see it this is the ultimate expression of the marriage between user-centric flexibility and corporate control. A Project Independence based Type 1 hypervisor or the now only semi-mythical XenWorkstation Type 2 hypervisor (or dare I say it VMWare Workstation) should provide the foundation for this marriage.
There are however two features that I will insist on having;
The ability to create 'windows' from the personal image into the corporate image (I need to be able to update that .ppt at the same time as I am watching the movie)
The ability to run multiple (at least 3) guests at the same time
Here's the thing though, today's ultra-portable doesn't have the physical resources necessary to run a client hypervisor so if you want to BYOPC you're going to have to ditch the netbook and buy a real laptop.
Apr 21, 2009
desktop2020 blog says:
Feature request #1: corporate image "windows": Yeah we are on the same pag...Feature request #1: corporate image "windows": Yeah we are on the same page. That is definitely the intent. May not see in the beta but definitely on roadmap.
Feature request #2: 3 guests at a time: I don't see that as a problem. Only restriction will be memory and CPU on the laptop.
- Re laptop, my portable is a little better than a netbook but you are right, if i want to run Type 1, I will need a new machine with vPro Intel chip. But I am counting on being able to run Type 2 and getting some of these features without trading up.
Apr 14, 2009
Anonymous says:
many companies that I work with wont even allow non-company assets on thier netw...many companies that I work with wont even allow non-company assets on thier network
which makes me wonder how much traction BYOC will really gather
Apr 21, 2009
desktop2020 blog says:
I am working with one government agency with the same rule: only govt owned pcs....I am working with one government agency with the same rule: only govt owned pcs. However, with virtual desktops, they are ok with employee using personal pc. There is no data whatsoever on the local pc in that case. With BYOPC, company can restrict apps to run only on a VM. Even if we have client side hypervisor, we could restrict the corporate (or government) VM from being checked out (ie copied to the local hard drive). Then when the person leaves, its just a dumb copy of Windows with no corporate functionality.
Oct 23
Anonymous says:
What large companies are doing this?What large companies are doing this?
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