What do Virtualization and Cloud executives think about 2011?  Find out in this VMblog.com series exclusive.

The largest cost component for managing desktops is operational, including staff to support image and application management, security, provisioning,   backing up data, and server maintenance.   2010 was the year customers started to realize the benefits of centralized desktop management in order to circumvent these challenges, however it's been unclear which desktop virtualization approach will win out. 

In 2011, we anticipate many customers will seek ways to host their desktop management solutions as a service. Instead of a wide deployment of hosted solutions, there will be a shift toward looking at these solutions, with modest actual deployments.  However, a completely centralized desktop virtualization model is unlikely to be adopted widely due to the prevalence of laptop endpoints. Thus,  the winning solutions will come from a hybrid, cloud-based approach that manage desktops in the data center but execute on the end points.

Some of the key aspects that need to be addressed to support cloud-based laptop management services include:

• The ability to execute on the client with good performance, while managing the images at the data center
• Efficient transport and optimized synchronization over Wide Area Network (WAN) - as all clients will connect to the cloud over WAN
• Easy to use tools that are optimized to managing a large number of centralized desktops
• Security - isolate organizations from each other in the datacenter

Finally, effective solutions for 2011 will  also  provide data protection, continuity and universal access to desktops across distributed organizations while overcoming the limitations found in early virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) approaches.

About the Author

Dr. Issy Ben-Shaul leads the technical and product vision for Wanova. Prior to co-founding Wanova, Issy was the CTO of the Application Delivery Business Unit at Cisco and led the technology and vision for the successful Wide Area Application Services (WAAS) product. Issy joined Cisco via the acquisition of Actona Technologies, where he was Co-Founder, CTO and Vice President of Engineering. Actona developed leading edge technologies for file server and protocol acceleration over the WAN, which became the foundation for the Cisco WAAS product. Before founding Actona, Issy was a faculty member at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, working on wide area distributed systems. Issy holds a doctorate and master's degree in computer science from Columbia University and a bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science from Tel Aviv University.