BlueFire has been dealing in virtual desktops for five years but a question that faces the Sydney reseller applies to the IT industry generally and that is to decide between the cloud and more established managed services.
For instance, Chromebooks, notebooks from Acer and Samsung running Google’s Chrome operating system, run popular applications such as Gmail in the cloud at the ad-search giant’s data centres around the world and delivered through the browser. And the success of Salesforce.com software for keeping track of sales leads and clients delivered as a service is a headwind to software makers that stream such applications from their customers’ data centres.
BlueFire chief information officer Jason Serda says there's money in making IT easier for small business customers through the use of virtual desktops.
"They are are not interested in complexity. They’ve heard every story in the book and they just want something that works,” Serda says.
Since Dimension Data bought BlueFire two years ago, the managed-services provider has expanded to seven data centres in Australia and New Zealand and Asia.
BlueFire sells service providers hardware, software, training manuals, brochures, services and collateral to sell their own cloud services for desktop virtualisation.
Two recent wins are Amcom Telecom in WA and Bharat Sanchar Nigam, an Indian Government telecommunications company. Six deals are in the wings, Serda says.
BlueFire supplies a dozen services over virtual desktops including backup and disaster recovery, Microsoft’s Exchange and Office. Serda says managed services supplied over virtual desktops will still sell well against cloud services such as Microsoft Office 365 because managed providers have better support.
“There still is a requirement for service,” Serda says.
“I think they still want to call someone. We provide 24x7 response with guaranteed times. With cloud, you’re relegated to email support.”
BlueFire competes with Telstra, which sells Microsoft Office 365, the cloud version of the software giant’s business productivity software and the next version of its Business Productivity Online Services. Serda says BlueFire often wins because its service is “quite similar” and yet is “in country, it’s high speed and you have better” contractual agreements.
In 2005 Microsoft was rolling out Windows Vista IT. At the time, as IT managers were asking how to roll out the operating system, desktop virtualisation was emerging as a fast, clean if more expensive way to install an operating system on PCs.
But today, millions of devices running operating systems such as Google’s Chrome OS and Apple iOS are filtering into organisations, and applications have jumped from on-premises servers to streaming cloud providers. Still, vendors touting the case for desktop virtualisation push the line that business cases have expanded.
“The age of true browser-independent applications is upon us,” says VMware product manager David Wakeman. “I can grab any device or OS, open up an app that is browser based and that solves a whole range of problems. I can consume what I want, security stays at the user level.”
Opening Windows
Whether an application is running on a local hard drive, as a virtualised instance from a data centre or through the browser, it needs an end point such as a desktop or mobile device controlled by a user.
“The desktop is just a place that you use to get your apps,” says Citrix channel manager Nabeel Youakim. Desktop virtualisation has redefined itself as a very cost-effective way to manage hundreds of desktops or devices. “I don’t see the need for virtual desktops going away because of cloud. In the enterprise there are a lot of apps; a bank might have 600 or 700. They have a tough time getting rid of them,” he says.
“There’s enough Windows apps in the world today that would require you to have a Windows OS in the mix for quite a long time. “Most will want to still run Windows apps, especially SMEs which have the most unstructured data in (Microsoft) Excel and Access.”
The Citrix Receiver software sits on most devices and operating systems to offer a personalised app store created by the enterprise, Youakim says. Apps are web- based or software delivered as a service and they will run in the organisation’s data centre.
And despite the attractiveness of cloud computing, most enterprises won’t ditch their PC environment. Most are preparing to move to the next versions of Windows and need to work out how they will build a next-generation desktop.
There is a boom in desktop virtualisation driven by the Windows 7 refresh and by the rise in server virtualisation championed by VMware.
Citrix’s sales are up 20 percent in Asia Pacific last quarter and in Australia “it’s more than that”, Youakim says.
Wyse, the terminal maker and advocate of desktop virtualisation, is “hiring like crazy” across Asia to meet demand, says its Asia-Pacific general manager Ward Nash.
Nash had just returned from road shows and candidate interviews in Singapore and Brisbane, and was getting on a plane to Mumbai and Hong Kong. Wyse has sold 3000 seats to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, 2000 seats to iiNet and 1000 to health insurer HCF.
Two tenders each of 100,000 seats – the Department of Defence and the Victorian Government – demand thin clients. “What we didn’t have 12 months ago was purchase orders for 1000 seats or 2000 seats,” Nash says. “People don’t throw out all their PCs and buy thin clients; they might wait for them to break and replace them gradually.”
He says VMware was the spark that ignited the virtual desktop industry and the “perfect opportunity for Wyse to make everything server based”. “The PC is not needed; for us, this whole thing is a dream come true.”
And vendor competition has raised awareness; VMware and Citrix have sales teams as does Microsoft. It is now cheaper and easier to deploy and almost matches a typical desktop PC, attractive for mid-sized companies upgrading their operating systems.
“I don’t want to just build another fat PC stack that I have to look at in eight years when Windows 9 arrives,” VMware’s Wakeman says.
“Customers are not sure what the makeup is going to be in five to 10 years time, and they’re interested in how partners can help them build a new infrastructure that is more fluid and delivered as a service.” Wakeman says it’s a bridge: “They’re using it as a way to make it more cloud-like”.
Wyse’s Nash says applications are all that is missing. “I can do my email and so on, but does everything work? The answer is no. People don’t move that fast.”
Virtualisation for the little guy
The attractions of desktop virtualisation are the same for small businesses as for the top end of town but vendors such as Microsoft’s Jeff Alexander are sceptical of a widespread acceptance due to infrastructure cost. He says virtual desktops are of little use to a small business of fewer than 25 users.
“When you’re trying to virtualise a desktop there are a bunch of things you have to do at the back end to make that happen,” Alexander says. “That may be more expensive than they’re willing to do.”
The infrastructure cost is a barrier to such deployments, which is why it is often paired with server refreshes that deliver the grunt needed. “You can’t deliver all this on low-end hardware,” Alexander says.
This is why Microsoft has 250- seat minimum and Citrix rarely gets involved with less than 1000 desktops. VMware’s Wakeman says the benefits of desktop virtualisation kick in at 500 seats where management is a major issue.
“For a small IT team there is a distinct return on investment around making desktops easier to patch and manage,” Wakeman says.
But it presents a major opportunity for managed service providers streaming applications from their data centres, although perceptions over lost control need to be countered by the savvy reseller.
The hosted model would make desktop virtualisation more
attractive to smaller companies that are unwilling to pay for servers powerful enough to handle the heavy workloads of virtual desktops.
What the leader is doing
VMware is pursuing three strategies. The first is desktop virtualisation in vSphere, it’s cloud platform. Wakeman says this year it has seen installations rise to sales of seats in the thousands, such as the recent IBM win with 5000 seats on VMware View at the Department of Health and Ageing. Education is also an aggressive adopter.
The second is an early release of Project Horizon, a cloud service that delivers software as a service and Windows applications due for wide release later this year. VMware will make it off-premises so partners can build solutions around it.
The third is VMware’s expanding armoury of bought applications, including productivity suite Zimbra, presentation maker SlideRocket and social networking platform SocialCast.
“I’m yet to hear a customer who says the future for me is to put everything I have today in a locked stack on the desktop with Microsoft into another vendor’s locked stack in the cloud,” Wakeman says. Instead customers are probably going to consume “bits and pieces of everything and use VMware to get there”.
“That tends to be the message that we hear from customers and I’m sure partners are hearing the same thing.”
IBM has just released its own virtual desktop software package that has infrastructure software required “up to the gold master”, says its sales executive Nick Day. That makes it much easier to integrate components from vendors.
For remote offices or mobile workers the gold master standard operating environment is installed on the local hard drive to synch with the data centre when connected to the network.
The package white-labelled by Gartner “cool vendor”, Virtual Bridges has disaster recovery, troubleshooting, an operating system and management console for the desktops and the server.
“Our partners and customers download a couple of files from our central website, and they basically have a virtual desktop up and running in two hours,” IBM's Day says. “It’s really about simplicity and speed.” It is $215 plus GST a user a year; there is no server licence.
Day says partners are selling it to customers to deploy on their servers or with hardware. Some partners are looking at a hosted or cloud model. He says deployments of the software released in April will be up in three months and he predicts that in-house installations will be most popular with resellers managing their clients’ networks using the browser console.
And the third wave will be generic, virtual desktop services supplied on demand by partners but IBM must update its software to support multi-tenanted instances before that happens. Multi-tenancy should arrive before the end of the year and support for zero clients is planned. The package uses the KVM hypervisor that requires to be installed on bare metal. A reseller could run an instance with customers or an implementation a server for each customer.
“Our solution would require those to be run on physically separate servers today. We can’t run a hypervisor in a hypervisor,” Day says.
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