Sam Routledge's Blog

It seems me that there is a bit of a ‘perfect storm’ around desktops at the minute:

• The ‘credit crunch’ means that everyone is looking at reducing costs, and desktops are always under the spotlight.
• The ‘credit crunch’ has also meant that many people have put off upgrading devices for some time
• Whilst VDI might be the latest industry buzzword, it has at least reignited conversations around server-based computing
• And of course there’s a lot of fuss around Windows 7 (hey, we’re halfway through rolling it out internally at Softcat!

The upshot of all this is that there are a lot of IT departments who want to, or need to, upgrade their desktop estates – but who don’t want to do it the same way again!

Perhaps this could best be referred to as delivering ‘desktops as a service’ – or provisioning users rather than physical devices. The basic premise is managing desktops through separation of the hardware, operating system, applications, profile and data. Today the options for ‘doing desktops differently’ are primarily based on some form of desktop virtualisation (I’m not talking about pure hosted virtual desktops, rather encouraging people to look again at the desktop and application delivery technologies available) or through the use of a client management tool such as Altiris, Frontrange, SCCM or KACE. I’m also following with interest the developments around client hypervisors (Brian Madden writes intelligently about this approach here) – that could be the best of both worlds and a simple approach to deploying desktops in a very straightforward manner.

How are you going to be ‘doing desktops differently’ through 2010, Windows 7 and beyond?

Update (19/3/2010) we are running an event on exactly this subject. Registration will be available shortly here.

This entry was posted on December 8, 2009 at 10:27 am and is filed under Desktops, Software Asset Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.