The New Face of Office Desktops

While reconciling your inventory of 300 desktop PCs in your office, you realize that at least half of them have become old and outdated. If you were faced with this situation a few years ago, then the only two options you really had were to either replace the really outdated PCs with fresh ones or upgrade the somewhat outdated ones. You might have even replaced some with either laptops or netbooks. The good news is that today, those are not the only two options you have, because you can provide the same desktop to your users in so many several different ways. In fact, the new technologies that are emerging are focusing on pushing the desktop remotely to any device, and not necessarily a desktop PC. It could be a thin client, a web browser, or even a mobile device such as a smartphone or a tablet PC. This opens up a plethora of new options for organizations to consider, besides simply buying new PCs to replace the outdated ones.

Evaluating so many options and finding the most cost-effective one for your business needs is now the new challenge. While you may save on the cost of purchasing new desktops, you'll end up spending somewhere else like ramping up your bandwidth, upgrading your data center infrastructure, or beefing up your security. In all probability, you'll end up using a mix of different options. This doesn't of course mean that you won't buy a new desktop PC at all. You might even find that the good old desktop still turns out to be the most cost effective option. In some cases, such as graphics designing, multimedia, etc, desktop PC might still work out to be the best option in any case. But the good news is that at least you have more options to consider. Here's a quick look at some of them.

Hosted Desktops: This is one of the most popular options today, being actively considered by a lot of organizations around the world. A sub-set of this technology, called VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure), puts all desktops into a data center as virtual machines. Apparently, Gartner predicts there will be 49 million VDI users by 2013, and the market will be worth $65.7 billion in revenue. VDI brings about radical changes in the way an organization's IT infrastructure would be shaped in the future. In fact, VDI in a way is bringing IT back into the mainframe days where all the power rested centrally in the Big Iron. Only difference is that today you have very smart devices for the front-end rather than the dumb terminals of yester-years. Because this is a very important topic, we've covered it in more detail later.

Hybrid desktops & PC sharing devices: Other dramatic options include hybrid cloud based desktops, like the one offered by Novatium Solutions (read it at http://ld2.in/3v1), and products that share a single PC amongst multiple users using hardware virtualization, like nComputing (read it at http://ld2.in/3v0). In case of the former, you get a low-cost, Atom based PC at the front-end, with a massive cloud based infrastructure at the back-end to provide all the applications. While this is a lucrative option, you have to be careful of vendor lock-in. The latter is self-explanatory, and can be used by educational institutes or organizations that need to provide an ordinary desktop for basic productivity to multiple people.

Bring your own device: More commonly known by its abbreviated term, BYO, the concept is gradually gaining popularity amongst organizations, thanks to VDI and the consumerization of IT hardware. It serves as an opportunity for organizations to encourage employees to bring their own laptops and netbooks to office, instead of issuing them desktop PCs from the company. The official desktops can be streamed over the network using VDI. While this can result in immediate capex gains, it requires investments elsewhere, such as tightening up your network security, giving incentives to employees for bringing their own laptops to office, etc. Support costs can also go up, due to non-standard devices entering the office. This concept is now extending to other devices like smartphones and tablets, because technologies like VDI allow a desktop to be streamed to them as well. VMware for instance, has clients for the iPad and Android based devices, which allows you to stream a desktop over WiFi to them. We've covered it separately in this story, along with other popular VDI solutions from Microsoft, Citrix, etc. This concept is still at a nascent stage, but with the technology already available, it could catch up very soon, and might end up becoming more successful than the concept of bringing in your own laptops and netbooks. Besides Citrix, application streaming is also offered by other popular vendors like Symantec, Novell, and Microsoft.

Application Streaming and Thin Clients: This concept needs no introduction, because it has its roots in the age old concept of thin client architecture that was popularized by Citrix. Today, the concept has evolved into streaming applications over the network instead of the complete OS, using lightweight protocols like RDP and ICA. A lot of organizations find the thin client architecture to be very suitable for automating remote branches, which are located in rural areas, and are difficult to service.

Web desktop: This is also not a new concept, but has begun to gain traction recently. This basically provides a desktop environment through a web browser. The front-end can be Windows, Mac, Linux, or UNIX. The benefits to this include accessibility from anywhere and any device. Plus, since everything's hosted in a central location, it becomes easier to manage. The downside is network latency issues, security (since it's hosted on the web), and lack of control for the user. Some popular web desktops include eyeOS (http://ld2.in/3v8), Nivio, and Glide OS. As you can imagine, the desktop PC is undergoing a phenomenal change, thanks to so many new technologies. What's required therefore, is a careful assessment of your options. Chances are that you'll opt for a mix of different options.