Why Ballerinas Don’t Fall Over

By Martin Ingram
published: Thursday, December 17 2009

I was recently trying to explain desktop virtualization and the new wave in client computing to someone from a completely different branch of technology. We talked over all of the amazing technology for componentizing the desktop -dynamically delivering identical software components into a VM for each user to eliminate the configuration drift that has made supporting PCs so difficult and expensive in the past, and how managing the user environment separately from the standardized components allows us to keep the standardized components clean and still give users the familiar and productive experience they expect - effectively allowing IT to achieve economies of scale across software in the PC estate.

We talked about how operating systems will be delivered to the desktop fresh every time and application virtualization will deliver strictly corporate applications, and how Citrix and VMware are vying to become the winner in this fast growing market with Windows 7 migration being the catalyst for organizations to adopt desktop virtualization. In short, we discussed all of the maturing technologies that customers are now, or will be very shortly, rolling out to increasingly large user populations.

We then dug into service based models such as SaaS and Cloud, which are going to become increasingly important parts of client computing in the future and how the services they deliver will need to be integrated together and managed by customer organizations in order to fully receive the benefits they have to offer. We had just got into a discussion on how economies of scale play into cloud computing and how the service providers need to get economies of scale by standardizing as high up the stack as possible, when he interrupted and asked me a question “with all this choice replacing the once deceptively easy choice of just giving a user a PC how does an organization decide what and how to deliver.”

It was a simple question, but one that made me think - we get so involved in the problems we are solving right now that we can lose track of the overall objective. Corporate IT is about making users productive at an economic cost to the businesses and currently that means lowering cost each year. So as we look at our technology choices today and as we look forward we need to take steps towards more efficient componentized delivery technologies and adopting the technologies that work for each group of users at a particular time. The decisions are not that difficult if you look in the now and architect now for what you will need in the future. The key to this will be selecting a user environment management solution that allows you to manage and deliver user environments across all the platforms you are using now and are planning for the future.

And, since you ask, this is exactly how pirouetting ballerinas avoid falling over as the spin on their toes - while their bodies spin their heads stay focussed on a fixed point. As we look at the dizzying array of technologies that are becoming available now, we need to keep our eyes fixed on our objective - creating a managed personal computing platform that users will accept. That means standardizing software components and personalizing with user environment management.

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