Virtual desktops on the prowl

There are a few good reasons why IT has been stymied in deploying more thin clients on workers' desktops. But if you strip down all of the rationalizations offered by CIOs and thin-client vendors to the essence as to why rollouts have been limited, it's because thin clients didn't work the way users worked with PCs. That's about to change.

Next month Citrix Systems Inc. of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. will ship its XenDesktop software that lets you create virtual machines for individual PC users. Sumit Dhawan, senior director of product marketing, claims management is drop-dead simple. "All you have to do is pick Windows XP or Vista. That's it." Well, not quite. But compared to the way Citrix XenApp (aka, Presentation Server; aka MetaFrame, for you oldies) handled those few, but critical applications end-users needed, which forced you to use Citrix with PCs, rolling out thin clients should be fairly painless.

Plus, when Citrix ships XenDesktop its partner hardware companies should be ready with a host of new devices that users will like for their fat-client-like performance and capabilities. This even includes your road warriors. You know, the ones who are losing laptops and creating security, compliance and PR hell for IT departments. Take the Viance Pro M laptop from Wyse Technologies Inc. of San Jose, which will ship on May 20 and starts at $599. It has the look and feel of a standard 15-inch laptop. According to Jeff McNaught, chief marketing officer, the "appliance," as he calls it, powers up in 10 seconds or less (and shuts down equally fast), has no fan or disk drive so it's utterly silent and works with any approved USB device. It's got Bluetooth, which means Blackberries and other devices can sync. It comes standard with WiFi and 1 Gbit/sec Ethernet connectivity and has a slot for 3G wireless cards. So long as a user can get a signal, he can work.

The combination of XenDesktop and hardware like the Wyse Viance appliances may turn the tide for making thin clients the preferred way to compute inside the enterprise because users get everything they want; IT gets better desktop management; and companies get vastly improved information security.