Corporate Express CIO, Gary Whatley, couldn’t agree more. His organisation is trialling iPads for its mobile salesforce in customer presentations, and for its executives. He sees virtualization as being essential in any tablet PC strategy.
“The virtualized environment is an important one because for us, one of our concerns is people running their own hardware we aren’t able to control that environment,” he says.
“With virtualized environment, you can run a corporate virtualized environment machine and have total control over it. So, virtualization makes these kind of devices much more controllable.”
It's this control that is at the heart of much of the angst IT departments feel over the invasion of tablet PCs. For one thing, it is a massive cultural change, IBRS advisor Kevin McIssac says.
“In the past, IT has controlled [devices] and said what you can have, even down to the chip level sometimes. They then put an OS on it, lock it down and try to manage it and they deliver it, mostly for cost and security reasons.”
Now IT departments have to adopt a different model, or at least another option in conjunction with the locked-down model, in their provision of computing services.
“For those BYO devices IT needs a second stream where they say ,‘Yes, you can bring those [devices] but we won’t buy them, we won’t manage them, we won’t fix them when they break, and the only way you can access corporate data is through running some kind of thin client software’,” he says.
For IDC senior analyst, Trevor Clarke, client virtualization solutions are probably the best option for securely supporting tablet PCs in the workplace and in enabling a BYO device policy.
“The application and desktop virtualization solutions on the market at the moment are mature enough to support almost any kind of user,” he says.
“In any case, for [tablet PCs] it is unlikely a user will be a heavy multimedia producer — think 3D modelling — which was one of the historical complaints with client virtualization solutions.
“Making sure your backend infrastructure is set up appropriately — in particular storage, servers and networking — is also key, and the cost of doing this is often underestimated, as is the user acceptance of such solutions.”
For IBRS’s McIsaac, the leading argument for virtualization is that there is just no way that most organisations (unless they standardise completely on iPad's, for example) can afford to have the tech support resources to manage the whole gamut of BYO devices.
“The old days of locked-down desktops are gone — you can no longer say it’s Blackberry or nothing,” he says.
“What you can say is, 'Corporate device — we’ll supply it, if it breaks we’ll fix it, we’ll minimise the cost and maximise the service as that’s our baby. But, if you want something else ... (an iPhone or a Linux laptop), we don’t care, but it’s your problem.' We will, however, provide [apps and data] through a network-based protocol.”
According to McIsaac, Citrix is probably the major choice for facilitating this, and the vendor’s software has a number of advantages today.
“That’s at the top of my list, but if you are already running Windows Terminal Services you can use a terminal services approach, too,” he says. “VMware has its View stuff on the PC and they will also do something on the iPad at some stage.”
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