Last week, I had the privilege to attend BriForum and represent our company, Virtual Bridges. This also afforded me the privilege to be with a community of people whose single purpose is fostering innovation in Desktop Virtualization technologies. It was by far the best industry event that I have attended – where the focus was more on ‘show/prove it to me’ rather than the ‘marketicture’.
Brian Madden has definitely become established as a ‘trusted brand’ for customers, partners and vendors alike. I recently came back from a two week trip to Europe visiting our customers and partners in the Netherlands, Germany, Hungary and Paris. Wherever I went people recognized BrianMadden.com as the trusted source for all desktop virtualization technologies.
In addition to meeting our partners and customers at BriForum, I also got the chance to attend several technical sessions. These sessions inspired me to put down the following thoughts:
1. There is a lot of vigorous debate and religious views in the community about client-side hypervisor vs VDI. Some of our friends even questioned the wisdom of having a ‘hypervisor’ on the client side.
My view to this is that people are missing the fundamental requirement that our customers ask us all the time – ‘how do we deliver a ubiquitous, portable, and consistent desktop experience to users whether they are online or offline across a range of devices without compromising security’. Once you start looking at this requirement, you don’t think it is VDI or client-side hypervisor [Type 1 or 2 does not matter] – but it is a problem that requires a fully integrated solution.
For example, as a regular user I would like to use my desktop from any browser [or thin client] – but when I go offline [on a plane], I would like to use the same desktop on my laptop and/or from a portable drive. If I am typically offline, and I forget my laptop and/or USB stick, I still would like to access my desktop by simply walking up to any browser and launching my environment in a VDI mode.
This is the scenario that we often get presented with from our customers. The ‘magic’ that makes all this happen is ‘bi-directional data sync between VDI and Disconnected modes’. This provides users with a consistent desktop experience across the full range of access modes with availability to the same applications and data.
The underlying technology that makes this all happen is the ‘portable hypervisor’ that works on both VDI and disconnected (off-line VDI) mode.
When I first looked at the Citrix XenClient product after their big launch at Synergy, my first reaction to Citrix was “why would you launch yet another standalone solution?” Their approach of separating XenDesktop and XenClient into two separate solutions that require creation of separate desktop images, separate Mgmt infrastructures and separate user profiles – is really missing the point. But, then again, no one would ever accuse Citrix of being easy to use 
2. I was very impressed with all the innovation that is happening in the protocol space, particularly with the live demos of all the protocols side-by-side. That being said, I felt that there was too much emphasis on the image/video quality [frames/sec], types of compression, etc.. – but lacking any audio integration… There is hardly any video in the world that is useful without audio coupled with it.. The fact that the protocols did better with video on MUTE does not say much about any of the protocols. I think it is extremely critical to look at both audio and video [in sync] and also the bi-directional nature of it – particularly with VoIP type applications that we see more and more businesses starting to use.
3. Speaking of the display protocols, we were told in many sessions that the reason why RDP [including RDP7] does not do well over WAN is because it does “Lossless compression” whereas others do “Lossy compression”. This seems to be the main differentiator – excluding the client-side redirection/rendering.
So, when I met the Microsoft Product Manager responsible for RDP, I asked her about this.. She denied that RDP is only lossless saying that it is a myth that RDP does not do lossy compression. She did admit that they are selective about using it – for example, it does not make sense to do lossy compression for text etc.. Anyway, the net-net is ‘don’t take everything that the other vendors say about competitive technologies as gospel”
I also felt very gratified that we had senior people from Citrix, Microsoft, VMware, Intel, etc… coming to our booth to check us out. The best compliment that we got was when they said “we made a deliberate note to come check you guys out. It is good to have more successful players in this industry”.
Finally, I heard several people trying to paint the vision of 2015 for the virtual desktop. Customers have problems now. We need to present working solutions now – not wait till 2015. That’s what we focus on at Virtual Bridges!
Srini is VP of Product Management at Virtual Bridges
