Patrick Kuiper, information technology and digital director at Smith&Smith, talks about taking a SaaS first approach, the nuances of vendor management and experimenting with emerging technologies in the era of rapid change.
Cue Clothing CIO Shane Lenton on how to take on - and partner with - digital giants
IntegrationWorks CEO reflects on his career ascendance through an ICT springboard.
What next for Cisco, Citrix, HP Enterprise, NetApp and co?
Apps used by millions of iPhone and iPad owners became vulnerable to snooping when a flaw was introduced into third-party code they used to establish HTTPS connections.
This will enable students to use resources anywhere, on any device, at any time, says CIO Mike Harte.
VMware, Microsoft score high in test of hosted virtual desktop infrastructure
Staff at a quarter of small and medium businesses (SMBs) are now using their personal smartphones and tablets for work, but more than two thirds of those businesses have no controls in place to manage these devices, and 45 percent of IT managers are unaware of all the devices being used.
If two technology trends were ever made for each other, at least in vendor marketing materials and generically simple diagrams of IT infrastructure, they are the consumerisation of IT and desktop virtualisation.
Analysts who study desktop virtualisation say many of its use cases fit neatly into problem areas that their client companies face, such as the consumerisation of IT. End users who insist on using non-standard or unapproved computing devices, such as tablets and iOS or Android smartphones, make demands on the IT department, the remote-access infrastructure and the IT budget, according to Ian Song, research analyst at IDC. When the same user wants to use two, three or four computing devices for different reasons, the situation can quickly get out of hand.
Sumit Dhawan, vice president, desktop virtualisation, Citrix Systems, leads strategy and plans for Citrix's desktop virtualisation product line, Citrix XenDesktop. Dhawan has been one of the key leaders in driving product, marketing and go-to-market strategy for XenDesktop product and has positioned Citrix as a leader in the desktop virtualisation market. In his current role, Dhawan is also responsible for key strategic alliances for Citrix in the desktop virtualisation market, including partnerships with Microsoft, Cisco, NetApp, Dell and HP.
In the wake of an analyst report certifying Citrix's XenDesktop 4.1 as the only product that fully satisfies all the criteria for enterprise-class desktop virtualisation, Citrix Systems has come very close to conceding it will remain an also-ran in the market for virtual servers.
Burton Group analyst Chris Wolf blogged last week that Citrix had met all of the 52 criteria that the analyst company considers to be absolutely necessary in products designed to allow large companies to host end-user desktops on data-center servers rather than physical PCs.
Desktop virtualisation has a predicted growth curve that leaves much of the PC and IT services industries smiling: Yet none of the technologies or service providers promising to offer hosted virtual desktops are ready to step into key roles in enterprise IT infrastructures, according the same well-respected analysts who set the server virtualisation market on its ear with a similar conclusion last year.
"Very simply, none of the hosted virtual desktop providers can match the requirements for the enterprise," according to Chris Wolf, infrastructure analyst at The Burton Group (purchased recently by Gartner) who presented a critical report at last week's Synergy Citrix conference in Las Vegas.
Virtual desktops - once the most rigid, least friendly way to put applications in front of end users - have become a hot topic by promising to deliver the security and easy maintenance that was always desktop virtualisation's strength. The trouble: Desktop virtualisation now comes in so many varieties that even vendors confuse terms referring to the flavours.
Market leader Citrix Systems, now working hard to expand virtual desktops into roles that the company hasn't traditionally filled, rolled out a version of its Xen Desktop solution last fall that allowed customers to choose any of six major delivery methods.