Doing business with Jason Poyner of Deptive
The technical director of Deptive talks about about getting change management pointers from Rob Fyfe, and a sure-fire strategy to keep abreast of technology trends.
The technical director of Deptive talks about about getting change management pointers from Rob Fyfe, and a sure-fire strategy to keep abreast of technology trends.
After catastrophic earthquakes in Christchurch toppled its New Zealand law office, Duncan Cotterill implemented desktop virtualization to provide stronger disaster resilience, according to the law firm’s CIO at the time.
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.
Virtual desktop infrastructure started as a grass roots initiative around 2005, when VMware noticed its customers configuring desktop operating systems and applications as virtual machines on their ESX Hosts. Someone at the company recognised the opportunity, coined the term Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and with that an industry was born.
Today, as CIOs look for ways to reduce expenditure without risking competitiveness, VDI is increasingly popular. With the cost of managing a virtualised PC environment typically 50 to 60 percent less than managing traditional desktops, VDI appeals to any organisation – from government bodies and large enterprises to small businesses.
After Hurricane Sandy flooded its Lower Manhattan headquarters, EmblemHealth enables displaced employees to re-engage and reconnect with their co-workers by supplying Dell laptops to maintain productivity from remote locations. -Company headquarters flooded by Hurricane Sandy’s storm surge left 1,900 employees without offices -Loss of office space for so many corporate staff employees threatened to disrupt a timely conclusion to the company’s fiscal year-end -Newly gained flexibilty and productivity was enabled by access to over 900 laptops and desktops from Dell