"The rubber still isn't hitting the road in terms of good case studies or compelling reasons why users are going to fall over themselves." - itX's Greg Newham
- The death of PCs?
- Dipping a toe in the water
- The road to mainstream
- Creating a market
- Is there a need for standards?
To illustrate one of the biggest problems with virtual desktop today, Datacom’s Mark Mackaway drew a comparison to the battle between Blu-ray and HD-DVD.
“Some people are saying it’s one or the other [Citrix or VMware] when we really need to get the complexity across. There are so many products that you can pick or choose,” he said. “Interoperability creates issues in some instances but that’s where we as integrators can talk to clients about what they are and tailor products so we have a suite that works in any given clients environment.
“That generic deployment experience is one of the key things lacking from any of the integrators. That’s not to say the skills aren’t there – we just need to avoid the polarisation argument because we are at the steep end of the learning curve.”
Regal IT’s Mark Gluckman was encouraged that key vendors were starting to talk the same language and said that would eventually get through to the user community.
Citrix’s Rob Willis said there was already a great deal of standardisation but that it was “under the covers a lot of the time”. However, he said there would always be differentiation between vendors and that was good for the market because it provided choice for users and partners.
Sonnet’s Frank Mulcahy said one of the advantages of being in a two-horse race was that you could call your technologies standard because nobody could really argue with you.
“Citrix as a company, if it wants to help the community, needs to define its standards very clearly around its own product set,” he said. “We need to simplify the message because it’s the people who aren’t involved that we really need to get to.”
