The desktop of the future: centralised and social?

The desktop of the future: centralised and social?
By Laurent Séraphin, senior product director, Centrix Software

Published: May 18 2009 17:45 | Last updated: May 18 2009 17:45

The desktop is one of the most important utilities for many organisations today. It provides a primary point where, in the digital economy, most workers consume company services and resources and access tools that help them carry out their work: transforming data into information up its value chain.

Over the past 15 years, the PC has been the dominant device used by the majority of the workforce, but the inherent challenges of maintaining and managing PCs has become a serious hindrance for IT departments.

Two major technology trends have emerged that will affect this on a wider scale and impact how organisations plan their desktop strategies: IT centralisation and cloud computing.

These trends are pulling desktop strategy in two different directions, so how can organisations make sure that their IT strategy really meets the needs of users, and delivers value back to the business?

The first stage is to look under the hood. The points of provision and points of consumption for IT services are moving apart. Users have more ways than ever to access their applications and services. It means the IT resources underneath – enabling them to access anything from anywhere – is complicated: many-to-many relationships, relying on multiple nodes and multiple infrastructure stacks to deliver multiple applications and resources.

To reduce their costs and make management simpler, IT is facing two choices: either try to centralise the distribution of applications and resources as much as possible or move applications and services on to the internet as part of a cloud computing strategy.

Both approaches aim to cut the time and cost associated with desktops by broadcasting virtual desktops or publishing virtualised applications (similar to the TV broadcasting model) to the user but they move the level of control and management in different directions. Do you look to centralise and lock down, or give the problem to a third party?

The two technologies that have accelerated these trends are virtualisation and now cloud computing.

Virtualisation splits the workload from the IT resource that it is running on, meaning that PCs can be held in the central data centre instead of under every desk. This approach can deliver greater management control over desktops, while also reducing the overheads that are associated with support. However, it requires resources to be hosted centrally, which can drive up cost.

Cloud computing is seen as the future for some facets of IT services. Much like real clouds, IT clouds can come in a variety of different forms: internal or external; trusted or non-trusted; on premises or outsourced; public or private; and web-based applications. What cloud computing can deliver is greater flexibility and over time this translates into greater business agility benefits.

The main impact on users from cloud computing today is the relative complexity of delivering services to users. The value of the applications held in clouds can only be realised when users can use the services quickly and efficiently. While most cloud-based services are simple to access and operate, there is still a lot of fragmentation: information can reside across multiple services, applications and clouds.

What these two overall directions for the future have in common is to make all services available via a browser-based interface. The availability of internet connectivity makes this more attractive to organisations as the entire spectrum of end-point devices, from desktops through to smartphones, laptops or netbooks can be assumed to have a baseline browser capability, and therefore give access to the same services wherever the user is.

However, as the browser becomes the lowest common denominator, the user experience can be greatly reduced. The functionality and richness that the desktop can provide is often sacrificed.

At the same time, users are becoming increasingly difficult to satisfy. Technology is part of daily life, and this has made users acutely aware of how easy using IT resources can be.

The gap between the private digital experience and the professional IT environment is increasing, leading to dissatisfaction. The main risk that organisations face is that, despite being a success from an IT standpoint, projects are not delivering all the value that they can as users either work around services, or don’t use their full potential.

Users want to retain the richness of functionality that they are used to, so centralised approaches such as virtual desktops can be a let-down.

Similarly, web-based approaches are not yet delivering on their promise, as the most common user experience is very crude. Typically, a user will have to navigate through multiple nested and tiled desktop environments, or “walled garden” style applications where information cannot be taken out of the system. This leads to push back from the users, and is the biggest reason behind the slow adoption of new IT services.

While these two trends are pulling desktop strategy in different directions, by focusing on the browser it is possible to design systems that aggregate applications from wherever they happen to be and deliver them to the user in a way that fits in with their working habits.

In order to meet user expectations and encourage them to make the most of their IT resources, IT has to deliver the best of both worlds: the control and support that centralisation can provide, with the flexibility and innovation of cloud. Without this combination, users won’t get the experience that they are used to.


laurent.seraphin@centrixsoftware.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009