Q&A with Dr. Benny Tritsch of AppSense

BT: After finalizing my master thesis in high energy physics at CERN in Geneva in the early 90’s I decided to take a deeper dive into computer technology so I joined a European PhD program in computer graphics research and development dealing with graphics and multimedia remoting in distributed learning environments. This allowed me to learn important lessons about the technologies that are essential for desktop virtualization. In 1996 I started deploying and extending Citrix products and Microsoft Terminal Services in international computer graphics research environments.

I left the research department in 1999 and since then have held leading positions in consulting and product development businesses around terminal services and desktop virtualization. I started educating the remote desktop community and wrote several books about these topics, published by Microsoft Press. In essence, I have been dealing with Windows desktop and application remoting including all related virtualization technologies for the past 20 years, even though the terminology was a little bit different at the beginning.

It’s important to note that I believe we still have a long way to go until all aspects of virtualization are in a perfect shape, which is great news. There’s still a lot of interesting work ahead of us and I’m looking forward to it. As a former physicist I also know that it may take a while until R&D results are converted into products that are ready for the mass market. It’s all a matter of timing. And now is the right time for user virtualization which extends the benefits of other virtualization technologies to IT as well as the users.

BT: As part of my consultancy practices, I have worked with AppSense technologies for many years as it is the underlying solution for many of my enterprise customers.  Over time the tactical solutions provided by AppSense turned into the strategic user virtualization product. Seeing the importance of this technology first hand in real world environments drew me towards the leading provider of these solutions - AppSense.

User virtualization deals with something we tend to forget in today's enterprise IT: The user! IT managers and administrators are facing the challenge of users wanting to work on multiple devices with diverse hardware footprints and with different operating system variants. Many users are very demanding these days. They have developed strong emotions and opinions towards their PCs, tablets, etc. and applications they use on a daily basis. So making sure that the user experience is as smooth as possible while maintaining enterprise compliance rules is the final frontier. This is why user virtualization is such a hot technology, useful for both large enterprise environments to cloud-based consumer services. It has created a large and rapidly growing market, complementing other virtualization technologies, such as desktop virtualization and application virtualization in a rather natural way.

Being part of this user virtualization story is very inspiring. And why go for anything else but the market leader?