As you might know I’m the CTO of a super cool company here in France (Activlan) base around Paris and one side of my job is to watch in my crystal ball to know what our customers will need and how they could use us to remain on top of their productivity with their IT. Reducing cost and accelerate process; giving flexibility and liberty to their users and keeping the information safe when needed. What’s very cool in my job is I always exchange so many things with you all during events, when we meet here and there, online and in real life that is give me a flavor of what’s happening in IT in a lot of country very different than here in France. Of course I try to give back what I learned of all this shared experience and knowledge but these last months I’ve been busy working hard on some other project.
So, this title brings me back to an old blog : VDI ok, What’s next ? published in May 2012 where my conclusion was :
What really matters in the vWorld ?
In the end, the data.
I think that was about right in 2012 and you know, with all the VDI, RDSH, offline and online, Hypervizor of all type, application installed, streamed or isolated, using a phone a tablet, a thin client or a computer, in the end the only thing that matter remains data.
Software vendor in our segment are pushing harder and harder their mobile (ie MAM and MDM) solution thinking everyone should buy these software and work with tablets and phones. I think we aren’t still there just yet… When someone is hired in a company this is almost all the time a giant waste of time (and money) the first days… No desktop ready, no application access etc… In the big company, MDM and MAM need to be addressed but that will never be wildly use for the next 2/3 years, what user expect from their company is to have access to their data (core need) through a applications accessed via a desktop, or not but with a consistent environment. They want to work in an optimal way during their working hours and sometime be able to access their data from home or a remote location, but taking over the personal people’s phone is over-rated for now.
The MAM MDM hype remind me the VDI stuff couple of years ago… VDI is here but definitely not everywhere… VDI is tactic and we use it where we need it, to address specific needs and requirement. I really thing extreme mobility will be the same. Plus solution available are not perfect yet, there is a lot of room for quality and improvement.
But I see more things and future project happening around Dropbox (-like), ShareFile (Citrix), Datanow (AppSense), solution to manage data and provide the ability to access and synchronize data and Windows desktops, VDI, Local, RDSH will remain mainstream for years still. Just keep my mind open and ready for more and other solution but most of the big companies and big SMBs will move very slowly to new working style model – At least here in France – To many change around working laws and mindset to change in this “old fashion” country… This will take some time.
This is a very trendy topic as well and I would like to engage discussion with you, if you want to share your point of view, your experience, just go ahead and comment !
