VMware Aims For 'Post-PC World'

For the record, desktop operating systems and applications in a VDI scenario run on virtual machines located on a server; users access these machines remotely. Users can run thin customers to access their virtual desktops, or use full-fledged Windows, Linux or Mac hardware – regardless of the operating system running on the virtual desktop.

The operating system

This model allows enterprises to separate the operating system and applications from the hardware, increasing flexibility and mobility, for instance, by providing a full desktop experience over RDP on a Windows Mobile device.

Not to worry. VMware and competitors just as Citrix, Wyse and Hewlett-Packard, are feverishly working on solving those problems, because the potential business rewards are great.

The need for client ubiquity

“We’ve addressed the need for client ubiquity; we will have new customers available for nearly any device you can think of. We’ll have integration with providers of Voice over IP and unified communications.”

In a post-PC world, control of data and files cannot belong to any one device, as it did for 20 years in the Windows client-server world, Maritz said. “We have to float away that other aspect of the desktop and find a different solution for that,” he said.

The lines of abstracting physical devices

Along the lines of abstracting physical devices, Maritz said that VMware is busy working on providing software for “virtual phones”. VMware already has virtualised and abstracted servers, storage arrays and PCs, so the phone to all appearances is straightway in line. Maritz, nevertheless, didn’t say how far away this software is on the roadmap.

“This at heart allows you to have two phones on one physical phone,” Maritz said. “What the enterprises will do is equip people with a virtual phone, and whatever phone the user has that virtual phone will live in the same physical phone, nevertheless it will be walled off from the user’s personal environment.

“There will be a set of capabilities associated with your work phone that will be controlled by IT, and at that time you as a consumer can do whatever you want in your personal phone.

Comparing on-premise business applications to cloud equivalents, Microsoft concludes cloud computing has positive effects on the environment