Search results matching tag 'Immidio'

Project VRC's State of the Industry survey results: 32% of VDI is stateless, and over 50% of companies don't use third party UEM. These results and more!

Gabe Knuth — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Last year, Project VRC invited people around the world complete an extensive survey that asked them to describe their desktop virtualization environment. 662 people took part in the survey, and since it closed, Project VRC has been busy making sense of the data. That information was made available today, and after looking at it, I want to share some of my observations. There are so many useful data points that I can't talk about it all in one article, so I invite you to visit the Project VRC website and download a copy of the results.

Before I get into the data, I thought I'd share some background on Project VRC. It was started in 2009 as a collaboration between PQR and Login Consultants to develop best practices and collect information on the desktop virtualization space. Ruben Spruijt (@RSpruijt) and Jeroen van de Kamp (@TheJeroen) (of PQR and Login, respectively) are the founders of Project VRC, and, along with a team of like-minded geeks, have compiled and shared much information over the years through white papers, presentations, and community involvement. These guys–and I mean this in the best possible way–are crazy! I don't know when they sleep, or when they stop thinking about desktop virtualization. The end result, though, is some really awesome information. (So thanks, guys!)

On with the data

I took a ridiculous amount of notes when reading the survey, but I can't possible write about them all. It's broken down into many sections, including VDI, SBC, comparing stats between the two, and explaining how Oracle stacked the deck. Well, they didn't say "stacked the deck", I did. Let's just say once Oracle learned about this survey, the number of Oracle responses skyrocketed. This information has been sanitized, and the Oracle numbers in the survey are believed to be accurate. We had the same problem (not with Oracle, though) when we polled our readers for the vendors that we should include in Geek Week, when we had a sudden influx of votes from a single IP address that belonged to Symantec :)

Let's look at some key observations:

Hypervisors

There's no surprise here that VMware makes up the vast majority of hypervisor usage, with vSphere 5, vSphere 4, ESXi, and ESX making up 63% of the responses. Surprisingly, Hyper-V 2 is in use in 9% of organizations, which beat out XenServer's 8% share. They also note that 10% of the organizations are migrating to Hyper-V, which I have to say isn't all that surprising. Microsoft has made many improvements, and has all but declared war on VMware in that arena.

While we don't know the percentage of people migrating away from Hyper-V, the key takeaway here is that while MS was bringing up the rear, they are now the third-place hypervisor, and people are actively migrating towards it.

WAN Optimization

47% of companies have no WAN optimization at all in their environments, which isn't surprising. Those that do are using Citrix, Cisco, and Riverbed, followed by F5 and Juniper. Citrix is the clear favorite there, but with almost half the respondents doing nothing at all, there's a lot of room for growth with regards to the vendors and a lot of room for improvement with regards to the user experience and WAN utilization.

VDI

It's no surprise that XenDesktop has a 44% share of the connection broker space, or that View is second with 27%. What is surprising to me is that Oracle came in at #3 with 13%, beating out Microsoft (6%) and Dell vWorkspace (just 3%). Perhaps this is due to Oracle's marketing efforts (that's the word Project VRC used), but it could also be the loyal following that Oracle VDI has. It will be interesting to see this same statistic next year, which we can use to gauge how Microsoft is doing with RDS in Server 2012 and to see what, if anything, Dell is doing with vWorkspace.

Probably the most interesting aspect of this is that 32% of respondents were using stateless VDI as the primary desktop platform, while another 36% had at least some stateless VDI in their deployments. Those numbers are way out of line with perception, and I can't wait for Project VRC to mine that information more. In the future, they'll slice up the data in other ways to try to get an idea of what's going on. I have personally seen an increase in the use of stateless VDI when I ask the question during the VDI Road Shows that I give, so I'll be curious to see the results.

SBC

Not shockingly, SBC is in widespread use in 85% of respondents organizations. 40% of respondents said that SBC was their primary method of desktop and application delivery, while another 35% said it was in use alongside traditional desktops. Around 2/3 of people said that they use XenApp 5 or 6, followed by Windows Server 2008 R2 with 13%. Oracle and Server 2003 both came in around 4%.

Just over half of the people said that they use Windows Server 2008 R2 x64, while Server 2003 R2 x86 was in second place with 23%. This isn't surprising, since Server 2008 x86 is essentially Vista Server. I don't expect to see that number drop until we get closer to the EOL date for Server 2003, which is July 14, 2015. Until then, we might even see increased use in Server 2003 as a way to extend the life of Windows XP applications past April 8, 2013.

Storage

33% of respondents are using their existing storage for desktops, which we've argued against in the past because desktop I/O is so much different than standard I/O on storage arrays (or even that of server virtualization). It could be that their storage was already optimized for desktops, though, which I imagine would work just fine for everyday use as well. 42% have a dedicated storage solution just for their desktops. The vast majority of them are using well-known vendors. Additionally, of the companies using VDI, almost 3/4 of them are using centralized storage as opposed to local. I wonder if it's possible to mine from the survey the breakdown of stateless/persistent combined with centralized/local storage?

Citrix Provisioning Services beat out VMware Linked Clones, full clones and Citrix MCS for the top method of deploying desktop images.

User Environment Management

The leading method of managing the user environment is simply GPO (35%), followed by custom scripting (18%), then Citrix UPM (14%). RES, AppSense, and VMware View Persona all came in under 10%, while Dell vWorkspace, Liquidware Labs ProfileUnity, VUEM, and Scense were each used in less than 3% of environments. While it doesn't look like there's heavy UEM adoption, there are so many vendors in the space that it can appear that way. The clear favorite among third parties is Citrix UPM, but when you combine it with the shares of all the other solutions, organizations are roughly split down the middle on whether or not they use third party UEM.

Final Thoughts

A common thread throughout the survey is that companies place a high importance on user experience. In fact, the top four "innovation areas" in the survey have to do with User Experience (WAN, mobile performance, unified communications, and rich media). Still products, technologies, or methods that improve the user experience aren't highly used. Almost half of the responses indicated that there is no WAN optimization, and over half of the responses show that companies are simply using GPOs and scripts (although you could argue that people don't see UEM as an innovation area). That can mean one of a few things:

Those are enough and all the users are happy
The users aren't happy but IT doesn't know/isn't willing to fix it
The third party solutions aren't good enough to justify the expense
Awareness of third party solutions is low, or organizations are still just getting the lay of the land

If user experience is truly king, then you would think these solutions would be in more widespread use. I guess there's room for both the vendors and the organizations to grow, and since the key innovation areas called out are more about mobility and connectivity, it appears the public perception of what is needed gels pretty nicely with what we think (hooray!).

There is so much more information in the survey results that I cannot encourage you enough to download it and read it yourself. This article has only looked a comparatively small amount of information. There is detailed stats on SBC, application virtualization, load testing, web applications, storage, networking, server hardware, antivirus, and the vendors associated with each of these aspects of desktop virtualization. You can download the white paper, and check out all the other stuff they do, on ProjectVRC's website. Thanks again to Ruben and Jeroen for all the work they put into this!

Brian & Gabe LIVE #25 - Part 4: Brian is convinced Active Directory is dead

jrm125 — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 23:28:00 GMT

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Transcript:

Brian Madden: So we talk about, so we have managing the device versus managing the personality or the applications on the device, and this is a conversation, I look at app virtualization versus SMS or System Center, or look at managing like delivering apps and data versus, like, pushing out patches and owning the device.

Or even, Jack, like in your space, like mobile device management, MDM versus mobile application management, MAM.

And so I’m wondering that – The whole concept of, of what you gotta do with group policy and all the owning this device and locking it down, you know, there’s ways around that. I mean, iPads and Android devices can be controlled with policy, and there’s applications to enforce remote device wiping and password enforcement and encryption and that kind of stuff.

So maybe it’s that group policy and Active Directory are sort of like the old-school, back-winger managing devices, not managing users kind of thing. And this represents a break from the past, an opportunity for Microsoft to manage. And maybe Win RT is only gonna be managed with, like, Windows InTune and Exchange, active sync and that kind of stuff rather than having, like, all the muck that is domain management and domain-based group policy. So –

Gabe Knuth: I mean, that, that could be, but there’s, there’s actually as your Active Directory now, Active Directory running in the cloud.

Brian Madden: But let me –

Gabe Knuth: That’s a recent announcement.

Brian Madden: Let me ask you, though. Why? And is the reason for Active Directory in the cloud so that you can have your, the directory that actually controls system management coming from the cloud? Or is it more of like Microsoft wants to allow for cloud-based identity management? I don’t mean identity management like single sign-on and all that, but like every company has to have a master directory somewhere of like, “Here’s all my users. Here’s their names, here’s their passwords.” And now AD in Azure allows that to happen in the cloud.

But like – Because, because to me, Active Directory – And this is where – In the notes of this show, I was, I, you know, as we, as we sort of prepare for this show there’s a Google doc that we all share that’s like our talking points. And I wrote in there just before the show started, I made a note called “Screw AD.” And Gabe was like, “What’s that?” And I kinda said –

Gabe Knuth: What, what ad don’t you like?

Brian Madden: But, but, because what I’m thinking is like – Because to me, Active Directory’s kind of anachronistic now. I mean, it’s –

Gabe Knuth: Why is that?

Brian Madden: Because, so if you look at what we really need – So Active Directory, it did a couple of things. It was the actual main enterprise directory that we used. You know, user names and passwords. But then it also managed, you know, all like the computer accounts and group policy stuff. And like having, having all these policies applied to what systems can do and what software can be installed, how it can reboot your machine, having all that in the same directory that holds your, like, actual authenticated users, blech.

So I look in, in, look at –

Gabe Knuth: You don’t have to – Hang on. You don’t have to do all of that stuff.

Brian Madden: Well, where else would I manage my machines?

Gabe Knuth: I mean, it’s just there.

Brian Madden: Well right, right, right. You don’t have to. And in today’s –

Gabe Knuth: There’s, there’s tons of other ways to manage all that as well.

Brian Madden: Exactly. And so –

Gabe Knuth: Yeah.

Brian Madden: So, so 10 years ago, 15 years ago – Because even back to NT 4 system policies, where we were managing systems. We were managing computers and saying, “This computer has this patch and this software and this user and this configuration” and all that sort of thing. And as we’ve seen, especially with the acceleration in the past five years, we’ve seen sort of self-contained apps that have settings like for IOS and Android. And we’re seeing with, with the touching, Windows touching Metro apps and everything.

So we’re starting to see that, you know –

Gabe Knuth: I think that you call it Windows touching.

Brian Madden: There, there has to be a master directory somewhere that as I said, here’s a list of people, here’s their user names, here’s their passwords. You know? That kind of stuff has to exist somewhere.

But I think we can now decouple that from the systems management configuration, which is kind of like the old-school way of doing things. And so if we take – So Microsoft will want to –

Gabe Knuth: Yeah, but not if you’re Microsoft. Here’s – That’s the thing. So, so all of this stuff, I mean Microsoft is still – They’re, they’re, they’re hell-bent on still managing these devices and all of this stuff, and that’s a System Center and all of that.

Now, if you’re telling me you can run System Center entirely without AD, that’s fine. But without, without all the management components, and you still need AD for all the authentication and the authorization and all of that. Then that’s fine, I can subscribe to that. But in no way do I think that Microsoft is abandoning this.

Brian Madden: Okay, so maybe –

Gabe Knuth: It’s, it’s saying, “Screw AD.”

Brian Madden: And maybe we say this, like, it’s like “Screw desktop management.” But you know how we discuss how the word “desktop” actually means a lot of different things? It’s the UI, it’s the hardware, it’s the security container, it’s the identity container, it’s the app, run time, all that kind of stuff.

Gabe Knuth: Again, Microsoft is not going to be the first one to, to launch into that.

Brian Madden: Well, so, well, but here’s what’s interesting, though. Microsoft Sequel Server Business is bigger than their Windows business now. And so Sequel Server has a really good authentication system. If you just need a list of users and passwords in some way to authenticate people against that, I mean, you’re using Sequel. You’re not using AD.

And so I wonder if sort of long-term for Microsoft, them getting AD into Azure allows that to provide sort of identity – Again, I don’t want to call it identity management. I want to call it like authorization, you know, like –

Gabe Knuth: Well, it’d be like, it would be like Federation. I mean, imagine – So imagine if all, like if everybody had some sort of – If all of the SAS services and applications out there were based in Azure, right? And if everybody subscribed to the, the Active Directory from Azure. Now all of a sudden all of that stuff is there and you’ve got Federation with anybody that you need Federation with for, for authorization. And you’ve got access to all these applications. It’s already just built in, you don’t have to, don’t have to worry about it.

Brian Madden: Well, I’m looking at it –

Gabe Knuth: And so I wonder if that’s not Microsoft trying to make it easier for that kind of thing to happen.

Brian Madden: Agreed, agreed.

Gabe Knuth: I don’t, I don’t know that that’s a, that’s a home run proposition, but I think that that’s where that is initially.

Brian Madden: Well, look. Today, look at OAF and how OAF has just exploded. OAF was only invented a couple years ago.

Gabe Knuth: Right.

Brian Madden: And how it’s exploded. Like fucking everything now – Like I just set up a Pinterest account for my personal life, not for work, and you can’t even – You have to log in with Facebook or Twitter. It won’t even like – Because even they’re like – Can you remember how two years ago, like every single startup, they all run on Amazon web services and the cloud. Because now a startup buying hardware, they’re like, “Wow, what year is this?”

Gabe Knuth: Yeah.

Brian Madden: Now it’s like startup, like, “Fuck, we’re running user authentication? God damn, no. Everyone that’s at Facebook, at Twitter can” –

Gabe Knuth: Yeah, my mom has a Twitter account just so she can use Pinterest.

Brian Madden: Yeah. And so the, so but it’s kind of the same thing. So OAF and SAMEL and these kind of standards for like authentication and authorization across, you know, in federated ways, are really taking off. But getting that, getting that out of – Like if you have a corporate enterprise on-premises active directory, setting up like that to become an OAF provider to the world is really God damn difficult. It’s not – I mean, it’s, it’s not just push a button and forget it.

Whereas if the AD is moved into the cloud, that can be one of the things you check the, you check the tip box in the, in the GUI and say, “Enable OAF for my users.”

Gabe Knuth: Yeah.

Brian Madden: And then, and then off you go.

Gabe Knuth: It does apparently support that.

Brian Madden: I’m sorry?

Gabe Knuth: It does support that, apparently.

Brian Madden: Yeah, just like it supported Active Directory Federation service. Like all these things were –

Gabe Knuth: Yeah.

Brian Madden: Oh, you mean in the – The Azure version? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gabe Knuth: I, I mean the Azure Active Directory support OAF, it supports SAMEL, both versions. I mean, it, so yeah. It’s – They’re positioning it as, I think, another one of these web-based or web-wide, I guess I should say, authentication platforms. I don’t know why I can’t talk today.

Brian Madden: So my – But so, so that’s where I’m looking – So for Active Directory, you know, so what we use Active Directory for today – So that – Everything we’re talking about and what they take into Azure, like I’m board, makes sense. And yeah, Microsoft will provide that, Facebook will provide it, Google will provide it. And Active Directory is their legacy, so it will be some form of Active Directory. I’m fine with that.

The part of it – When I say “Screw AD,” I mean this whole concept of, like, all your machines are domain joined and you have, like, all these different stuff configured in Active Directory and your groups and computer groups and you’re applying policy. And all that, like doing that from the systems management AD standpoint, that to me seems kinda old school.

So tying back to Windows RT not being able to be domain joined, I’m thinking is irrelevant now because –

Rodney Medina: Yeah, but it, it, it is old school, but running Windows desktop applications is also old school. But the problem is people are using legacy, and they’ve really bought themselves into that like 15 years ago. And one of my customers, as an example, has 90,000 desktops running Windows 7 now. But they have thousands of desktop applications, and all those applications or a lot of those applications tie into the Active Directory structure. That’s just the way that has been built the last couple of years.

And especially for those organizations, this, this is really like very distant future or future for, for them.

Brian Madden: But it, it’s – So this is an interesting space to watch, though, and it’s funny how we always joke how those of us who are sort of desktop people and applications people, now we have to get into thinking about security and server virtualization and storage. And frankly, user authentication and user authorization, identity management, that’s really falling within our sort of bailiwick as well as some of these other things.

So I guess it just makes our job that much more difficult.

Incidentally, in the, in the chat, a couple people are asking about how things like GoToMyPC, LogMeIn, etc. work with this new Microsoft licensing. And that was actually something that was brought up in the comments of the article.

So those things work – All these remote access solutions – So first of all, all the stuff we talk about, like you needing SA and VDA, these are only when you’re connecting to remote virtual desktop. So VDI and stuff like that. If you’ve got a physical desktop computer, then the Microsoft license – And this is even if you, whether you buy the retail version of Windows, whether it’s Windows Pro. If you’ve got a physical desktop computer, you are allowed to connect to it remotely for the purposes of working remotely, troubleshooting, etc.

So if I have a laptop, I mean, I can buy a desktop computer, pop it under my desk, and use it as my primary computer via LogMeIn all day long with the regular Microsoft retail pay once license, and buy one –

Gabe Knuth: From where, from wherever you want on whatever device you want.

Brian Madden: Exactly.

Gabe Knuth: Right. Yeah.

Brian Madden: The key is, though, when you do that, though, that license is locked to that hardware. So you can’t – You know, the reason people use VDI is because you want to put this in the data center and do different little balancing and turning Windows on and off only when you need it and you’re redirected to a different server over here, and it’s failing over to another site and all that kind of stuff.

So you can’t take that copy of Windows – If you have a copy of Windows that’s licensed and locked to a specific piece of hardware, then you are able to remotely access it via LogMeIn and all those kinds of things.

Yeah, so then I was saying, so then brokering to physical PC via Zen Desktop does not require VDI/SA. That is a true statement. And that’s also –

Gabe Knuth: And in that regard, nothing has changed yet.

Brian Madden: Yeah. And that’s – Right. That’s how it’s been for the past 10, five or 10 years. And, and that’s actually what we thought at first that the OnLive was doing. And I guess –

Gabe Knuth: Oh, right.

[Crosstalk]

Brian Madden: – Know what they’re doing, although they have seen this switchover to using server instead of, instead of client OS.

Anyway, so I – You know, we’re kind of running up on the end of our hour. Some of the topics that we might talk about, Jack, I think you should talk about on your show on Thursday. Like you did an article saying, “Who’s Citrix gonna buy?”

Jack Madden: Yeah, yeah. And that’s, that brought up some interesting arguments about whether, whether Citrix would want a solution that really does the, the hardcore app wrapping and inspection or a, or a lighter, a lighter, a lighter mobile app store and distribution thing. And there was some interesting comments, and then one of the vendors responded with a blog post of their own.

So we’ll talk about all that on Thursday.

Brian Madden: Okay, so that’s, that’s on Thursday. You’ll talk about WatchDocs on Thursday, you’ll talk about I guess your week at MMS.

Jack Madden: The week at MMS and yeah, yeah, the supposed application management that comes from Windows InTune for mobile devices.

Gabe Knuth: I, so when they announced that last year, I emailed a friend of mine that works for the company I used to work at when I had a real job, and asked him – He, he’s like the head security guy there, and I asked him, “What do you think about InTune?” And he didn’t know what it was. So I explained to him desktop management from a cloud. And his only response to me was, “I just threw up in my mouth.” And so –

Brian Madden: He was a security guy, though, so –

Gabe Knuth: Well, but you know, it’s gotta get past these guys so, you know, before it takes off. And so I think that that’s the problem I think InTune’s gonna have across the board is, is, is getting buy-in by the security personnel. So we’ll see how it goes. I mean, now that they can do all of these things, now that they have the app management and mobile management and that kind of a thing built into them, you know, maybe that makes them a little bit more appealing.

Brian Madden: So the, this guy who’s saying – By the way, back to the chat room, “Just buy a bunch of cheap PCs and stack them in your data center.” Yes.

Gabe Knuth: Yeah.

Brian Madden: And, and in fact you can do a VM still, too. I mean, you are allowed to run – If you – You can buy retail licenses, even, and connect to them remotely, and they can run as a VM. The only thing is they can never, they have to be tied to specific users and they can never move between servers. But that’s an argument, I mean, the one – The idea of buying a bunch of cheap PCs and just stacking them in the data center, we talked about that. I mean, that’s fine.

Gabe Knuth: Mm-hm.

Brian Madden: Of course, you’ve got the same issues of failure and everything, like if a hard drive fails, then the user loses stuff. But hey, at least it’s in your data center this time instead of out in the field somewhere. So yeah, if you just need VDI – Or pardon me. If you just need remote access and you don’t want to deal with brokers and all that kind of crap, I mean, I don’t know. It’s – I, I have no problem with buying a stack of $300 Dell PCs –

Gabe Knuth: Right.

Brian Madden: And just stack them in the data center. Maybe it’s not the most efficient for power and it’s not the most efficient for moving users around, but it works and you don’t need any licenses for it.

Gabe Knuth: Yeah, exactly.

Brian Madden: So events coming up. I am down – A week from yesterday, I will be in San Diego speaking at TEC, The Experts’ Conference, apparently TEC stands for. I’m giving the keynote there talking about desktop virtualization and consumerization.

Then the following week, Citrix Synergy is here in San Francisco. That’s the 9th, 10th, and 11th of May.

Gabe Knuth: Are you speaking there?

Brian Madden: I am. I did not submit any sessions, which is kind of out of laziness rather than any sort of particular protest this, this time. But it’s – Their call – Their session, like their call for papers was like in October or something like that. And I’m like, “Well, shit. I don’t even know what is gonna exist in October. I mean, what’s gonna be the hot topic like on people’s minds?”

Gabe Knuth: Yeah.

Brian Madden: But I did get a Geek Week slot. I think I said I’d talk about VDI something. I don’t even know. And Laura actually – I never sent her an abstract, Laura Whalen from Citrix, who sort of like is the cat herder for all of us CTPs. And she finally gave up asking me. So I don’t know what’s on the agenda. So I’m doing something there. So Gabe, you’ll be out here for that.

Gabe Knuth: Yeah, yeah. I, I have not, I haven’t been notified of speaking at anything. But last time in Barcelona I was notified the day before both of my panels that I was on, so who knows. I will be there, though, one way or another.

Brian Madden: And then we’ve got the following week, May 17, I’m speaking here in San Francisco also on the topic of desktop virtualization.

And then, then the next day I hop on the plane and we go to London, where we have BriForum, which is taking place 23rd and 24th of May. Registration is now open for BriForum. Agenda is posted. We are working out all of those details, and BriForum – Incidentally, for BriForum in the U.S., taking place in July, our call for papers window is still open. So we’ve been getting a couple submissions per day for that, and you’ve still got time to get sessions in for another –

Jack Madden: May 25th.

Brian Madden: Yeah, so we got another month for that. So anyway, I think that’s, that’s all I have. There’s a whole lot of things that I’m really looking forward to your show, Jack, Consumerization Nation, with Jack Madden and Colin Steele. The two most brilliant names in the industry. And, and notice that the most, most brilliant names in the industry, not the most brilliant people in the industry. So you guys can –

Jack Madden: We’re, we’re working on, on, on that part.

Brian Madden: But yeah, so Jack, I’m looking forward to your show on Thursday. Rodney Medina, thank you so much for taking the time to, to call in today, and thank you for taking the time out of your evening to join us.

Rodney Medina: No problem. Thanks for having me.

Brian Madden: And –

Gabe Knuth: And for setting the record straight, so it’s, so we can definitely add Immidio to the list of companies that are not very threatened by UE-V.

Rodney Medina: Well, and now I’ll try to show you on Thursday. We’ll, we’ll handle that offline, yeah.

Brian Madden: We’ve, we’ve got a date for Thursday, and we’ll see you –

Rodney Medina: Next month in London.

Brian Madden: Next month at BriForum, yeah. All right. Well, and Gabe, as always, thank you so much for joining. Thanks to Paul for coming in. I hope it’s worth your free lunch. And to all of you, of course, thank you so much for listening. From San Francisco, this is Brain Madden of Brian & Gabe LIVE. Thank you so much.

Gabe Knuth: Thanks.

Rodney Medina: Thanks. Bye bye.

Brian & Gabe LIVE #25 - Part 3: We discuss how clueless Microsoft's new licensing and tablets strategy is

jrm125 — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 23:27:00 GMT

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Brian Madden: And nor can they afford to sell at a loss because all the app store stuff goes to Microsoft, not to them,

So – And no consumer –

Rodney Medina: Yeah.

Brian Madden: Like what – Is your grandmother gonna buy – I mean, what consumer in their right mind, besides – Because if you hate Apple, you probably hate Microsoft, too. And you’ve got, you’ve already got your Android tablet that you’ve hacked and put open-source software on.

Gabe Knuth: Unless you’re Benny.

Jack Madden: A Windows on ARM tablet seems like something that, like, your weird cousins from another state that you only visit every now and then would like, “Yeah, I knew somebody that had one of those.”

Brian Madden: Oh, yeah, it’s gonna be like, it’s gonna be like my L.A. Gear Air shoes that I had in sixth grade. We had, you know, it was like when Nike Airs came out – Paul, what kind of shoes did you have?

Paul: It was Reebok Pump.

Brian Madden: Paul had Reebok Pumps. Damn. You’re an only child of divorced parents, man.

Gabe Knuth: Oh, you lucky bastard.

Brian Madden: Reebok Pumps.

Paul: Just once. Once.

Gabe Knuth: All right, Millhouse.

Brian Madden: But I had L.A. Gear Airs, and I feel like – So I felt like such a badass going to school that day because my shoes had little windows in the side. But like clear, clear rubber, you know, in the back. But I’m sure that when RT’s –

Rodney Medina: I think the advantage, I think the advantage Microsoft has it that they have an, more of an open mind to, towards hardware vendors, so there will be more options available from a – I mean, everyone – A lot of people are sort of screaming for smaller iPads. And, well, Microsoft will just hand it over to all the vendors that bought themselves into the RT platform, I guess. So –

Brian Madden: But you know –

Rodney Medina: There will be more options. But the, the success will be – Will there be enough sexy applications available in the Microsoft store?

Brian Madden: It’s interesting.

Rodney Medina: I think that’s the whole deal.

Brian Madden: Yeah, but look at it. There’s already over 50 Android tablets on the market today. 50 different models of the Android tablet. Quickly, name five.

Rodney Medina: I advise them, so –

Brian Madden: This is open, open question to everyone.

Jack Madden: Samsung, Whizbang whatever it is.

Gabe Knuth: Galaxy.

Jack Madden: Yeah.

Brian Madden: Galaxy? Is that a tablet?

Jack Madden: Galaxy tablet.

Brian Madden: Okay, Galaxy tab.

Gabe Knuth: Yeah, I forget what the Asus one is. Asus has one.

Brian Madden: It’s Transformer something.

Jack Madden: Yeah, the Asus Transformer Prime. That’s –

Brian Madden: Look, we got five of us here.

Jack Madden: Like the tablet with the keyboard.

Brian Madden: We got, we got five of us, like, tech nerds here can’t fucking name five out of 50.

Jack Madden: Flippy the Clown names Zoom.

Gabe Knuth: Ooh, Zoom. Good one.

[Crosstalk]

Brian Madden: Asus, that’s a company. You can’t just name companies that may or may not make tablets.

Gabe Knuth: What are you talking about? Zoom is a tablet.

Brian Madden: No, I’m saying that the, the next one says “Asus” underneath.

Gabe Knuth: Oh, okay. Yeah. The Kobi Kairos. Le Pantici.

Jack Madden: I’m sure I walked by many of them at the consumer electronics show.

Brian Madden: Yeah, you see my point here, is that – So this is, this is what Microsoft have to look forward to with, with –

Gabe Knuth: This is sick. There’s so many companies that I’ve never even heard of before that have –

Brian Madden: Yeah, and so but to say that oh, all the world is waiting for – Meanwhile, in – While we had this conversation, in the past 15 seconds, Apple sold like 50,000 iPads. Do the match. I betcha that’s actually accurate.

So this is, you know – And by the way, there’s like a million – How many apps in the app store? Like 3 million apps or whatever? So anyway, but so –

Gabe Knuth: You, you know what? Will you be – Because right now I think you can go into a Walgreens, into a drug store, and buy a passive matrix, TFT screen, $79 Android tablet. And, and I think that that’s – Yeah, that’s the ultimate, like, rock bottom for any technology, right? And so I think that that’s where, that’s where we’re gonna end up seeing Windows RT.

Jack Madden: It’s like when DVD players started being, like, like $30.

Gabe Knuth: Yeah.

Jack Madden: But so the, the question that brings up, that brings, that this brings up, and I don’t want to open this can of worms again, but maybe everybody will head to these Windows RT tablets because you don’t need to buy a companion device license for them to access VDI environments.

Brian Madden: Well, so okay, that’s a good point.

Gabe Knuth: Ooh.

Brian Madden: No.

Rodney Medina: Okay.

Brian Madden: Because, because look. Okay. So let’s, let’s back up here. So, so Microsoft announced – As part of MMS, they announced their plans for Windows 8. They announced some licensing changes and I’m gonna just put these into the –

Gabe Knuth: Did you find that?

Brian Madden: Yeah, I got it here.

Gabe Knuth: Okay.

Brian Madden: Probably all the – So the license change, you know, this is the thing. And I guess to recap, and it sounds like such a crazy thing. So everyone knows that you need, you need SA. So first of all, Microsoft licenses Windows based on device, not based on users. So if you have 1,000 users in your company, that is in no way related to the number of Windows licenses you need. It’s how many devices you have in your company.

But now, so every device that connects into your Windows environment, if it’s like a VDI environment or terminal server or the VMs, every device, different device needs a license. But of course they realized but them if users to home, well wait. So you gotta buy a license for like every random computer internet kiosk friend’s machine that a user buys?

And so then Microsoft says, “Oh, okay. If, if the use – If the company has a device that the user uses on a regular basis for work, and that license has, that machine is licensed, then if the user is outside the office and uses LA devices, okay, they can just kinda ride in on that first one.”

But they defined it – And this is how it’s been now for the past five years. But they defined it based on – So if your user’s primary device at work is licensed, when the user goes out into the world, they can use whatever they want sort of on that same license. But if they’re at work, it has to be licensed.

So a user using, like, whatever devices the users use in the office, on premises they say, I believe, has to have, like the company has to buy a license for it.

But then that’s a weird thing that Nick Coutinho pointed – Or Nathan, pardon me, Nathan Coutinho from CDW pointed out to us, where he said, “So wait. If a user has an iPad at home and they connect to your VDI desktop from home, you don’t need an additional license. But if they walk through the door of the company, then you’re, then you need to buy a license for the iPad?”

Gabe Knuth: Yeah.

Brian Madden: And the answer is yes. You have to buy a VDI license for that. And then it’s like, “Well, wait. What if they have a phone and an iPad, and they use one for five minutes, an extra five minutes? Like yeah, these all require licenses.

Gabe Knuth: Yeah, each one’s a device. Separate licenses, not one.

Brian Madden: But it’s like, how the hell the company – Which is, which is crazy. Because in today’s world, the whole point of this whole virtualization thing is oh, just focus on delivering Windows to your users and don’t worry about the devices. But Microsoft still wants you to worry about the devices, but only when they’re at work.

And so clearly this –

Gabe Knuth: This is why it’s so confusing. I mean, this is, this is why - What did I say? You, you call Microsoft 10 different times and ask them about licensing, and you’ll get 11 different answers.

Brian Madden: Yeah, and so –

Gabe Knuth: And because, because of all of this. How could you possibly do it right?

Brian Madden: So the, so clearly this is asinine. So Microsoft in order to solve this, that’s why they create – So the, so the new change for Windows 8 licensing is they introduced a brand-new license called the companion device license, the CDL. And what this license – It’s for the scenario I just mentioned. So it’s an add-on on top of SA or VDA. So if you have scenarios where you’re buying SA, your primary devices are licensed, users are out in the world and they can use whatever devices they want, but then when they come into the company until – Your work office is like, “Oh my God, I gotta track these things?”

You can buy this CDL to say now whatever the users use in the company is gonna be, like, that’s okay. You don’t need an extra license for that because that sort takes those extended roaming rights that you’ve got outside your company and applies them also to inside the company.

Jack Madden: For the arbitrary number of four devices.

Brian Madden: Right. Which, yeah, so if a user has five personal devices – And how the hell you’re supposed to know that, again, is beyond me.

Gabe Knuth: Gotta buy two CDLs.

Brian Madden: Yeah.

Jack Madden: Yeah, or as a commoner said, you just have to have, you just have to inform company security to check everyone if they have an iPad, I’m assuming that’s when they come in the door or –

Brian Madden: But, but now, but technically, though, walking in the door doesn’t mean you need the license. It’s not until you access your VDI desktop.

So, but here’s the crazy thing, though. So first of all, no one can fucking know what is what. So companies who are afraid of being audited, what are they gonna do? They’re going to buy a CDL for all their users, you know? Just to like kinda play it safe.

And so really what we had is like a stealth price increase of SA. So they say, “Hey, you could” – It’s like a protection racket, you know? Like, “Ah, you know, you could track all this individually, or for a few bucks extra per user for year, maybe we look the other way for this.”

Gabe Knuth: Yeah, this is like promising not to introduce new taxes and just raising the old ones.

Brian Madden: Now, now here’s what, here’s what, here’s where it gets asinine crazy. As if this isn’t bad enough so far. With Windows RT – So what Microsoft announced is that if – Remember, the CDL, all this stuff, it only applies to personally owned devices. So if the company buys a user an iPad, and the company has the acid tag and the company owns that iPad, that device has to have the Windows license, the VDI license regardless because the thought is the company can track that and they know how many they buy.

You know, if the company buys an iPad and has that license, then you can use it wherever you are. In the company, out of the company, it doesn’t matter. So this is only for personal devices that users are buying on their own or that are borrowed or non-company-owned devices.

So, so this whole CDL thing is to cover personal devices in work, but now where it gets really shady is Microsoft said now if that personal device is running Windows RT, then you, Windows RT is gonna have this VDA, extended VDA license they call it, just to create a new one. It’ll have that license built in.

So basically if your users are going out and on their own buying Windows RT tablets, when they bring those Windows RT tablets into the office, you do not need to buy a CDL.

Now, let’s talk about all the ways that that’s fucked up. So, so first of all, tracking nightmare. Because this is – Again, now it’s like okay, so I gotta track which device. But if you have an iPhone and a Windows RT tablet and, like, you’re supposed to track, and the user walks in the door, it’s like, “Okay, if you access your device from this it’s okay, but if you use your iPhone, it knows it’s the web page, you can push it and it comes right up. But technically you owe us $30 if you do that.” That’s kinda goofy.

The second –

Gabe Knuth: But you know damn well Microsoft is going, “Hey, no, this is simpler.”

Brian Madden: Well, they fucking said that in the release. They said this is like, you know, “We heard our customers and want to clarify and simplify enterprise licensing.” But then, then the next thing is that they – So remember, this only applies to devices that are non-company-owned. So Jack, to your point –

Jack Madden: Right, right.

Brian Madden: When you were saying, “Is this gonna encourage” – Oh, because now if companies are buying tablets, then they can say, “Hey, instead of buying iPads for all of our users, let’s buy Windows RT for all of our users. So license doesn’t” –

Jack Madden: Right. So of course that doesn’t matter. It, it doesn’t matter. It needs a VDA anyway.

Brian Madden: Right. They need a full VDA anyway, so it doesn’t matter there. And users on their own, I mean, let’s be real. When that user walks into Best Buy, you think they’re gonna be like, “Well, if I buy this Windows device” –

And the company can’t even, like, say we’ll give you a rebate or a bonus because that’s the company acknowledging they’re keeping track of it, which means they have to buy full VDA for it. So, and not to mention –

Gabe Knuth: Is that, wait. Is that true, though? Is it just for personal for RT? Because I read that as RT, if you have RT and you’re corporate and your main PC at the workplace has SA, that the fact that you have RT is enough, whether it’s personal or business owned.

Brian Madden: That is true. Yeah, yeah. That is true. So you’re right. So, so in terms of companies buying these, these devices for the users, they can buy –

Gabe Knuth: They’re gonna buy them for everybody.

Brian Madden: Well, right. They can buy Windows RT and not have to buy separate VDA like they would with an iPad.

Gabe Knuth: Right.

Brian Madden: Which now that means, so now you have to pay – There’s an iPad tax, essentially. All this shit that like Citrix and Quest and VMWare talks about, you know, “Look how we can deliver Windows apps to iPads and Androids” and all that kind of stuff. You would have to pay $119 per year more if you’re delivering those to, to those tablets versus Windows RT.

Gabe Knuth: To non-Windows RT devices. Yeah.

Brian Madden: But, but why this is so messed up, though, is because so if – Like I could understand if Windows RT was like a full version of Windows and users could install applications, and it’s like, you know, you’re already buying the Windows experience, so what’s the difference here?

But remember, Windows RT is not. You can’t arbitrarily install applications. It’s only Windows Metro applications, which are your multi-touch, non like sort of huge enterprise apps. So this is where I talk about like antitrust in the article.

And a lot of people said, “Well, hey, it’s a free country, they can do whatever they want.” Or “Microsoft is a company, it’s capitalism.” But, but they can’t do whatever they want. That’s why, that’s why non-monopoly laws exist, and that’s why the Justice Department went after Microsoft. And so 15 years ago or whatever that was.

So that, that makes, that makes – The fact that Windows RT is, gets a free pass when all the other ones don’t, that just seems, seems super shady.

Gabe Knuth: Yeah, who knows if that kind of thing can stand up? I mean, I guess you could say, you could draw to applications or something like that saying, “Well, look, Apple – You know, this application only comes in a Mac. They’re not making them ready for Windows.” But I don’t know. It, it’s – I guess no matter what, even if it is shady, even if it is illegal, it’s not gonna be solved anytime soon, you know? That took years and years to draw out the whole Internet Explorer thing from, from whatever, 10 or 15 years ago. God, that was 15, wasn’t it?

So regardless of that, it’s still shady.

Rodney Medina: Yeah, but from a, from a company, from a company perspective, I really hope that all the IT pros out there realize that getting a Windows RT tablet for all the users will be the same management nightmare as an iPad. I mean, can I, can I manage device –

Gabe Knuth: I stole my device.

Rodney Medina: Yeah, it’s an unmanaged device. That’s also what Brian stated earlier today, I guess, about no group policy access, no membership of the domain, and so on. Because I think it’s really going to be focused on the consumer market. At least I hope. Because otherwise you will have the same struggles deploying applications to your iPad users that people now have.

Brian Madden: Now, along those lines of it not, Windows RT not having domain joins and not having group policy access, there’s an interesting conversation on Slashdot. And the poster, it seems like this was actually posted as like a spam type of thing, and the article is actually – The, the article that this conversation’s based around that Slashdot links to is a pretty uninformed article that misses a lot of key points.

But nevertheless, nevertheless, it’s, it’s – The conversations are, are good. And the question is basically they say, “Well hey, maybe Microsoft just ran out of time with Windows RT and didn’t have time to build the Active Directory support and group policy support and everything.”

And I – My belief, and I’m working on an article for this for brianmadden.com. But my belief is that it’s not that they ran out of time, it’s flat-out that domain joins and group policy represents the old way of managing.

Brian & Gabe LIVE #25 - Part 2: Rodney Medina gives his thoughts on Windows RT

jrm125 — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 23:23:00 GMT

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Brian Madden: Okay, so let’s, let’s talk about that. And, and the voice you’re hearing is Rodney Medina, CTO of Immidio, joining us from Amsterdam. And also we’ve got Gabe in Omaha and Jack and me, Brian Madden, in San Francisco.

Jack Madden: Sure do.

Brian Madden: And incidentally, in the chat room, Flippy the Clown, who is actually a known person on our site, asked about the recent Sky Drive upgrade. Google Drive, DropBox real competition. I’m feeling like that’s a conversation for Jack for your show on Thursday.

Jack Madden: Yeah, yeah. Well, the, the answer is I, I haven’t taken too close of a look at either one. I’m waiting to see will – The question seems to be will it be a replacement for DropBox? And the answer is possibly, if it does that completely effortless, that completely effortless integration that DropBox does for me.

Brian Madden: And so your show, give yourself a plug. It’s Consumerization Nation.

Jack Madden: So that’s Consumerization Nation, episode number two. Thursday at 10:00 Pacific, 1:00 Eastern time. Colin Steele is my co-conspirator on the show, and we’re gonna do pretty much all the same things that we do on this show except with the consumerization stuff that we, that we never seem to get to.

Brian Madden: Yeah.

Jack Madden: We have a, we have a, we have a lot to, we have a lot to talk about this week. A blog post that I wrote yesterday inspired not one but two other blog posts.

Brian Madden: Oh, you mean other in the world, like where people like –

Jack Madden: Like other people in the world –

Brian Madden: Blogged on you?

Jack Madden: Yeah, yeah.

Brian Madden: And what, where they like, “Who the fuck is this idiot?”

Jack Madden: Yeah, yeah. It was, it was fun.

Brian Madden: Man, if you can’t get a Wikipedia page now – Okay, so we were talking about Windows RT. So I guess some of the news that came out this past, since we did the last show was that the Windows on ARM, affectionately known as WOA, the official name for that is gonna be called Windows RT. Which is –

Gabe Knuth: What does that mean?

Brian Madden: Well, right. So this is weird to begin with because a) they announced that Windows 8 will be called Windows 8. Windows 8 server will be called, you know, Server 2012. Windows 8 will have, there will be Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro. So all those sort of branding around Windows 8.

But then Windows 8 on ARM doesn’t have the number 8 in it. It’s just called Windows RT, which is weird because RT usually has in, in computer world means real time. But Windows 8 on ARM is not – Like a real time OS and a solid-state OS is not the same thing.

Gabe Knuth: Right.

Brian Madden: So it’s not, it’s not a real-time OS. So you were at MMS. Did they say what the hell RT stands for? I’m pointing to Jack here, for those of you listening.

Jack Madden: No, no, they didn’t. And, but I, but I’m wondering, so is – A Metro on – Like the, whether, whether it’s Metro or not is not a part of this naming conversation. Because I was wondering what, what Metro on Intel or what Metro on x86 is called.

Brian Madden: Oh, that’s good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re right. So – Oh, isn’t that weird?

Jack Madden: Mm-hm.

Brian Madden: That’s – Yeah, yeah, that’s a good point. So those listening, we talked about in the past, so you know, Windows – So they’re writing a version of Windows for the ARM processor based tablets, which is gonna be more lower-power kinda like almost more like IOS devices. So that – But that’s, that’s just Windows on ARM. But then there were also the x86 tablets that run the real air-quote “Windows 8.”

Jack Madden: Well, and Windows. Right.

Brian Madden: But is that –

Jack Madden: And we also have the traditional UI as well. Like we saw – Benny, Benny Tritsch had one a few weeks ago when he was here in San Francisco.

Brian Madden: And Benny Tritsch is the biggest – As much as there are Microsoft lovers on this planet, Benny Tritsch is counted among their ranks. And even he was like, we’re starting it and it’s waiting, you know, like he turned the tablet sideways, and like 15 seconds later it’s like the screen changes.

Jack Madden: Well, so that was like a 13-inch tablet, and it was crazy because it was so big. So maybe it was just because it was so big.

Gabe Knuth: I played with one.

Brian Madden: Yeah?

Gabe Knuth: Last week. I had seen – Dell was a sponsor of the events that I was at, and they had brought a Dell tablet, an Intel Dell tablet with Windows 8 running on it. And yeah, I mean, you know, it was like using my Kindle. My Kindle Fire, right, where you swipe and then it kinda gets there eventually, and then you try to do the things, and it’s not very fluid. And I mean, you could just tell it was kinda hacked onto the device itself.

So I’m sure that’s what Benny was using. He wasn’t actually using an HCL-certified Windows 8 tablet, was he?

Brian Madden: No, you’re right, and it – But what’s funny, though –

Gabe Knuth: Yeah.

Brian Madden: Is so all the existing tablets, they do, they don’t do multi-touch. So you’re touching it, but it’s only tracking one finger point at a time. So it’s kinda like this weird – Like you don’t have the precision of a mouse because you’re using your, like, stupid fat finger. But you also don’t have the luxury of multiple fingers.

Gabe Knuth: Right.

Brian Madden: So like what makes using your fingers nice is that you can use multiple fingers. But there’s no – I mean, a lot of – And even actually the most recent Windows 7 multi-touch – So Windows 7 supports quote-unquote “multi-touch,” but it only tracks two fingers. And so existing Mac users or existing – Well, even Android IOS tablet users, you know, or like put these, you know, put, start putting their fingers on the screen and playing with it, and like –

Gabe Knuth: So no, no, no, no, that’s too many.

Brian Madden: You put 10 fingers on the screen, it picks two that it’s tracking. And so which two it picks –

But to the, to the point, though. So we know that Windows – All right, so remember that Windows RT, of course, will have – It’s, it’s all Metro, but then there still is, we discussed a few weeks ago, that desktop mode it can flip into to run Office 15 and – Is it Office 15, 14? 15?

Jack Madden: 15.

Brian Madden: I don’t even know anymore.

Rodney Medina: 16.

Brian Madden: Yeah, so it – It can run Office, it can run these things like in desktop mode. But the question is gonna be, so if it’s running real Office recompiled for ARM, we know that Windows Metro apps will not allow plug-ins and drivers and stuff like that. But we don’t know what the desktop side. So the question to you, Rodney Medina, from five minutes ago, is about whether the Immidio Flex will be able to run on the desktop portion of, of Windows RT to put those Office profiles in.

Rodney Medina: Yeah, we, we, we could because from a programmatic point of view, it’s just another processor architecture you need to compile your code to. But it’s, it’s all dependent of what they allow through the store. I mean, if you look at the success the way – I mean, from a consumer point of view, I’m a real iPad user. And the nice thing of an iPad is that the, it doesn’t get unstable because of the applications you install. Because it’s pretty much isolated as to what you can do as a vendor or an ISV.

And yeah, and also the power usage [inaudible]. So it’s really dependent of what they allow through the store because they want to have a stable tablet, I assume as soon as they are really wanna go head to head with iPad in the future.

Brian Madden: And so a question, and this is something, Jack, we had that conversation yesterday with Ryan. Tell me his last name? Ryan, Ryan –

Jack Madden: Kellemer?

Brian Madden: Kellemer. Let me see here. Ryan, yeah, Kelember. Kelember? Kelember. Kelember. Ryan. Sorry.

Gabe Knuth: You guys are good at this.

Brian Madden: So from, from WatchDocs. And WatchDocs, I guess Jack’ll talk about them on Thursday. They do sort of like DRM around files, you can sort of copy around of it. We were asking if they were going to be able to build a client for – Or integrate with the DRM features of Office on Windows RT. And he’s like, “We don’t even know if Office on Windows RT’s gonna support DRM.”

And meanwhile it’s coming out in six months. And I said, “What does Microsoft say?” And they’re like, “I don’t even think they know that that’s a question that people are gonna ask.” And yeah, he said, he said –

Rodney Medina: Well, well, there is that – The strange thing I can add, just that one of our developers visited the Windows Built conference for developers last year, and they had the, the ARM-based tablets up there. But like in the, when the show started that week, they all of a sudden decided that no one could even touch the devices. So they were just standing there behind the glass, and the developers were not even able to play around with it. So –

Brian Madden: Were they even real or was it just – Did they take a, take an iPad and like put a color form with the Windows logo on it? Like a screen shot of Windows that they ran in Photo Gallery and said, “Look at how sexy these new Windows tablets are.”

Rodney Medina: Yeah. Because yeah, that, the RT tablets will be more – They will have better, better battery life than the, the, the Intel-based versions. They will have a slimmer look than the, the Intel devices. So the thing I’m wondering is as soon as those, those Intel tablets and the RT tablets will hit the stores is that people will just look at the description, at the label, and they will say, “Hey, this one has 10 hours battery life, and it’s, oh, it looks cooler. I’m gonna buy the RT version.”

And then you come home and you’re, you feel just as limited as buying an iPad because you can’t do anything on the device what’s not in the Microsoft store.

Gabe Knuth: Right, and the person at Media Market or Best Buy here in the States, they’re not gonna know the difference between Windows RT and Windows 8. Yeah.

Brian Madden: Well, right. It’s gonna be irrelevant.

Gabe Knuth: Do we even know – Do we even know that RT’s going to come out at the same time as 8? I mean, we’ve been assuming this, I think. But do we even know that that’s the case? I know Jack had just mentioned that it’s six months away, but maybe it’s not. You know? Maybe it’s, maybe it’s a year away and maybe that’s why those conversations haven’t been had yet with Microsoft about whether Office would have DRM and that kind of a thing. Because maybe it isn’t even on the radar. Maybe the focus is on get 8 out, and then we’ll deal with RT and, and ARM versions of applications and stuff.

Rodney Medina: That’s a good point.

Brian Madden: It’s looking like – So Venture Beat’s saying there’s no date yet for – Yeah, this is a new article from right now that they don’t have the date of either, it looks like.

Gabe Knuth: Well, I – Windows 8 was always – I mean, the general consensus was late 2012, I think. So, but I, I don’t know that I’ve even heard such a, a vague date for WOA or RT.

Brian Madden: So the, the other thing about – So the problem with Windows RT of course, also, is that no one has it. So people have – Because remember Windows RT will not be available as downloadable software. It’ll only come prepackaged on these ARM-based tablets and phones and laptops and stuff.

So, so right now all these developers –

Rodney Medina: Well they, they need to make it available for developers before – Because otherwise they, they launch it and no software will be available.

Gabe Knuth: Well, that’s what I mean. The –

Rodney Medina: Well, what’s a man without the apps, I guess?

Gabe Knuth: I need to just stop pointing this. Yeah. And so, and that just – That’s one of the other things, too, that just leads me to believe that maybe RT isn’t going to be out for awhile. Because, because if the developers don’t have it yet, they’re not gonna have too many titles at launch.

But they did mention, I thought, that Metro apps would be compatible regardless of what the underlying platform was. So, so if you’re developing –

Rodney Medina: That’s a, that’s a - .

Gabe Knuth: If that’s true, if you’re developing for Metro now, it’ll run on RT as well.

Rodney Medina: It depends on what code you’re writing. So if it’s going to be html type of code you’re using for your Metro app, then it will work out of the box. But if you’re doing more heavy-duty developing, on C++ for instance, then you really need to compile it towards the different devices in the app store for Microsoft.

Brian Madden: Yeah.

Gabe Knuth: Okay.

Brian Madden: And Microsoft has said that they want to make it easy for developers to compile. So they want to make it so that if a developer is writing a Metro app, that they can just write it once and then compile it twice, once for x86 and once for ARM.

Rodney Medina: Mm-hm.

Brian Madden: But every developer I’ve talked to – And Rodney, you tell me this – It’s, that’s one of those things that looks good on paper, but inevitably you take your existing project and then push the compile for ARM button and see 47 exclamation marks why it’s not gonna work, and spend the next –

Rodney Medina: Yep.

Brian Madden: Between five minutes and seven weeks trying to figure out –

Gabe Knuth: Right.

Brian Madden: What the hell these things mean.

Rodney Medina: I think it will be, I think it will be a little bit the same when developing an application for the iPad or the iPhone. There will be two applications in the app store, and some of the applications are not visible on the other device, which doesn’t support it. I think it will be some sort of deal like that.

Gabe Knuth: Yeah.

Brian Madden: So the other sort of controversial thing around Windows RT, and this is something that – You know, we’re seeing the, in the, the, the, the questions in the chat room. So Windows RT, we spend a lot of time talking about who Microsoft is targeting that towards. Is it gonna be targeted towards, towards consumers, which I don’t know how the hell they – I mean, flat out, how they’re gonna beat iPad is beyond me, especially when iPad has 50 million per quarter of production volume and you have this, like, amazing device.

If Microsoft can’t build iPads – Or I should say, the Microsoft partners, you know, Acer and HP and them, they can’t build something as sexy as the iPad and sell it at profit.

Brian & Gabe LIVE #25 - Part 1: Rodney Medina drops in to talk about Microsoft UE-V and Immidio

jrm125 — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 23:19:00 GMT

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Brian Madden: My name is –

Gabe Knuth: How you doing?

Brian Madden: Hey. My name is Brian Madden and coming from San Francisco. That was Gabe you heard, I notice wearing your Ohio State gear.

Gabe Knuth: My wife makes fun of me because she thinks it’s all I have. And she may be right.

Brian Madden: Right. She’s making fun of you because that’s all you have or because that’s –

Gabe Knuth: Well, she knows better than I do because she does the laundry, so I don’t really – I just reach in and grab a shirt. So –

Brian Madden: Joining also from San Francisco is, is Jack Madden.

Jack Madden: Good morning, Brian. Good morning, Paul.

Brian Madden: Oh, Paul. And Paul. So we got Paul. So, so, so my childhood friend, Paul, is in the office. He also, he’s got the week off work, so we’re getting lunch together today, so he came in early.

Paul: Hello, everyone.

Brian Madden: And he – Paul helped us out with those Brian vs. Brian videos, if you remember those things we did for Citrix online. So he’s in the sort of –

Jack Madden: He’s in the, he’s in the credits there as our, as our consultant.

Brian Madden: Yeah. He’s sort of in the film-media-movie business.

Gabe Knuth: I’m looking – Because Paul is actually in that photo that we took in 1999 and Photoshopped us into that group of Microsoft –

Brian Madden: Oh.

Gabe Knuth: Do you remember this photo, the – The photo goes around as email. It says “Microsoft in 1976” and the tagline is something like, “Would you have invested in these guys?” And it shows all of these guys, you know, 35 years ago. And so one day we got a hold of this in 1999 and somebody had a $1,000 digital camera, and Paul was the guy that knew Photoshop, and he was interning for us at the time.

So we all snickered and took photos of the four of us, and then Paul spent the rest of the afternoon getting paid to Photoshop us into the corners of this photo. And I’m looking for that because we can post it to the Facebook page or something like that.

Brian Madden: Is that on our Facebook page right now? Yeah, I’m looking through that. Yeah. Oh my gosh. That’s – Yeah, good call.

So also joining us from the Netherlands is Rodney Medina. I guess to you, Rodney, good afternoon.

Rodney Medina: Good evening, even. Yeah.

Brian Madden: Oh, yeah. And where are you at this exact moment?

Rodney Medina: I am in Amsterdam in the media office.

Brian Madden: Oh, okay. Cool. And so Rodney, Rodney is the CTO of Immidio, and Immidio is the software company that spun off of Login Consultants. Login Consultants many people know from creating – Well, they have the Login VSI benchmarking utilities. Jeroen van de Kamp, one of our 10-time BriForum speakers, is at Login and created sort of flex profile kit back in the day.

And Login I know created lots of different tools, and Immidio spun off from Login. What is it, Rodney, now? Three, four years ago?

Rodney Medina: Yeah, we started Immidio in 2008. First of all we started off as a branch of Login Consultants, but well, a year later we, we really split from Login. And I actually worked at Login Consultants for six years when we started Immidio. So I was responsible for the whole productizing of all those tools that Login still these days even provide to the community.

But I was actually one of the people that left Login to commercialize flex profiles.

Brian Madden: Yeah. And you are also – You’re, you’re a Microsoft MVP –

Rodney Medina: Yeah.

Brian Madden: In App-V.

Rodney Medina: In App-V, yeah. That is –

Brian Madden: And you’ve been to speak at BriForum also in the past, I know.

Rodney Medina: Yeah, I think I’ve visited twice already as a speaker. And I will be there next month as well in London again. So the last couple of years was quite busy, especially from Immidio stand, standpoint. But it was time to, to submit some sessions again. So it’s cool to be there next month.

Brian Madden: And what are your sessions, what are your sessions at BriForum?

Rodney Medina: Well, the contents will be changed because of course we can now publicly talk about App-V 5 and also UE-V. We already knew for that quite a while, but we were not allowed to talk about that, as you know.

But since it’s open, I will definitely discuss App-V 5 as well from a personalization perspective. So the session will be mostly about App-V and how it handles the personalization of, of user settings.

Brian Madden: And so let’s talk about that because that’s actually kind of why we’ve got you on the show today. So Microsoft announced App-V version 5, and – Which is not out yet, right? It’s just been announced.

Rodney Medina: Yeah, it’s just publicly made available a couple of weeks ago. Two, three weeks ago. And there’s no timeframe yet, but normally it’s not too long after a major milestone release of Windows comes out, so probably within a couple of months of Windows – After the Windows 8 release, App-V 5 will be publicly available, I guess.

Brian Madden: Yep. And then also Microsoft announced that user environment virtualization, I think UE-V, which is – We spent some time talking about that last week, and I know you have some opinions on that. But I wonder, can you give us like 30 seconds on App-V 5? So I haven’t really been following App-V – I mean, 5, so it’s a major release. So what is, what, what’s new about App-V? Is there anything that you as an MVP are excited about?

Rodney Medina: Yeah, I am. I think it’s a really big release because since Microsoft acquired the, the Softricity company and the SoftGrid product in 2006, not a lot of architectural changes have made, have been made to the product. And the – Practically every piece of code has been changed now with, with the App-V 5 release. So from a functional perspective, there’s quite a lot of new features that people will like.

But I think the real exciting thing is that it’s really been built up from scratch with all the knowledge and experience for, for the last 10 years of using the old architecture, if I might call it that now.

So I think the biggest change will be for people is that the integration of the applications with the local operating system have, have been much improved because App-V the way we know it now might be isolating it a little bit too much why – So the shell extensions people are used to when you virtualize like WinDrawer or WinZip and stuff like that, all the right-click options you have, those were all not available capabilities in, in App-V 4.6 and below.

And with App-V 5 that will be a lot more open. So I think the integration is, is the biggest change people will, will notice, actually.

Brian Madden: That’s, now that’s a double-edged sword, right? Because if they open up more, doesn’t that mean that more applications could potentially conflict with each other?

Rodney Medina: Well, it’s still virtualized. It’s just less isolated. So the virtual applications with App-V 4.6 and lower are virtualized, but they’re also isolated a lot from the local operating system. So you can now much more see the virtual application bits actually being on your local system, but they’re still not touching System 32 or your actual, actual registry location. So it’s, it’s not an issue on a, on a conflict level, no.

Brian Madden: So let me ask you quickly. Microsoft Office, the number-one question people ask is should they virtualize Office in App-V or add it to the base?

Rodney Medina: Yeah, so are you asking for my opinion or –

Brian Madden: Yeah.

Rodney Medina: Or if, or if it’s a bad – Yeah, so there, there’s always a very heavy discussion at – Well, customers mostly, and also with the product team within Microsoft. Because it all depends. I mean, the way probably you and I use Office, for us it’s just a primary productivity tool. We start Word, we start Outlook, and so on. We use it really basically.

But in the enterprise services, a lot of applications integrate with Office. So the most integration you will have with Microsoft Office, the, the – Well, the more issues you might run into if you’re starting to virtualize Office. So it will be much better with the next release of App-V 5.

But my personal opinion still is make it a part of the base. Because it’s Office. It doesn’t have conflict, it’s really neatly installable, upgradable, maintainable. So, and everyone will use it in the entire company, so why would you virtualize it anyway?

Brian Madden: Really, right. Like, I mean when you look at sort of baseline platform, really where does Windows end and Office begin? It’s just part of –

Jack Madden: Right.

Brian Madden: It’s just part of your base image. I like that.

Rodney Medina: Yeah, yeah, I –

Gabe Knuth: We have a session. Aaron Parker’s giving a – We’re having a discussion, I guess, as part of our lightning rounds about that, whether or not it should be –

Brian Madden: So –

Gabe Knuth: What’s that?

Rodney Medina: Yeah, no, yeah.

Brian Madden: So moving on also now, now, we talked two weeks ago about this Microsoft user environment virtualization. Do I have that right? It’s UE-V.

Rodney Medina: No, it’s user experience virtualization.

Brian Madden: Oh, okay. So oh, Microsoft would love to make the user experience completely separate from the device.

Rodney Medina: Well, yeah. We’ll start virtualizing the users and everything will be okay, I guess.

Brian Madden: They don’t even know they’re not using an Apple. And so you listened to the show two weeks ago, Rodney. Did we – First of all, our characterization of UE-V was that it’s, it’s used to put user personalization settings, so it takes registry settings for the user but sort of injects them when they launch thin application, right?

So you can have a generic copy of Windows with a generic instance of Word, and launch it, and it’ll sort of pop the user settings in right as Word as launching.

Rodney Medina: Yep. That’s true.

Brian Madden: And then when the user closes out of Word, it pulls them back out again. Is, is that – That is correct? Like that’s what UE-V does?

Rodney Medina: No, not completely. Depends on how you imagine pulling it out. So what they do is they inject the personal settings into the application you’re starting, but they are actually injecting it into the real registry or your real profile. And when they export it, they don’t clean it up. They do leave it behind in your actual roaming or local profile.

Brian Madden: Okay. So –

Rodney Medina: So they, they capture the changes you’ve made. Or, well, they capture everything that you’ve configured it to export and import. And they do it on the fly. So it’s, it’s, it is like Gabe mentioned two weeks ago, it is much more sticking to the actual applications instead of loading all those settings at local [inaudible]. But they’re not redirecting it or really capturing it from the profile. So the real, the, the, the registry tattooing is still happening.

Brian Madden: Okay, so I think –

Gabe Knuth: So is –

Brian Madden: Go on, Gabe.

Gabe Knuth: Well, so – Well, the way I pictured it was much like flex profiles where you could essentially get rid of roaming profiles, use a mandatory profile and then have those settings imported and saved off at the end of a session. Is that – So are you saying that we still need regular read/write savable profiles, roaming profiles, to use UE-V?

Rodney Medina: Yeah. Because it doesn’t cover the complete base. You still have to – There’s no way in Windows to work without a base profile. You, you need one of those three, right? So even in Windows 8, the mandatory local enrolling profiles are still considerations. And they’re even going to be changes made to Windows 8 to be able to configure the profile settings for users even easier.

And I’ll actually add that to my session for next month because there are some, some nice stuff coming in Windows 8 on the configuration level.

But yeah. It’s, it’s still Windows. It’s still a profile that needs to be loaded. You can use it with, in conjunction with a mandatory profile, but then still –

Gabe Knuth: Okay.

Rodney Medina: You need to configure a lot of settings. But what I’ve seen of UEV up until now is on the application level, it can cover pretty much everything you want. But on a Windows OS level, it’s not capable of managing all the Windows settings.

Gabe Knuth: And that’s because it works only in H-key current user, right?

Rodney Medina: Well, that also has to do with –

Gabe Knuth: Or, or only within the profile, I guess.

Rodney Medina: No, it has to – Yeah. That’s true. But it also has to do with timing. So when they log on, importing like for instance the milted language into face of Windows, it’s too late. And with any media of flex, we actually have a specific feature making sure that we can cover all settings that are available in any type of profile.

Gabe Knuth: I see.

Brian Madden: And that sort of leads to my question which, which when we talked about UE-V two weeks ago, we sort of mentioned that okay, so this is sort of a more basic thing, probably companies like AppSense and RES Software are fine. But maybe the little more point solutions, like Immidio Flex, maybe that’s a competition.

And it sounds like this is you’re addressing some of the differences. And we’ll give you this shot right here. So now, now, now’s your opportunity as a CTO of Immidio to be fully commercial. Tell us why Immidio Flex – And this sounds like a, it sounds like a hard-ass challenge.

Gabe Knuth: Sounds like an easy answer.

Brian Madden: And I don’t, I don’t mean to sound that way. But like, so you know, if people are, see UE-V and they’re like, “Oh, Microsoft is solving this.” What’s missing there that Flex, that Immidio Flex evens, provides?

Rodney Medina: Yeah, well within Immidio, we of course have overlapping functionality with dual EV. But that goes the same for the other companies in the market space as well. So UE-V probably in the market, there’s actually – It’s a good thing and it’s also a bad thing because vendors like us, we have to explain more to customers if, if they have seen flex profiles in the past, of course. Because then their overlap is almost 100 percent.

The good thing is that Microsoft is actually really validating the market space itself, so people are starting to look at UE-V and then they probably in – Depending on the scenario, they want more functionality.

So if you look at the, the overlap that UE-V has with, with Immidio Flex, it’s the personalization part. And Immidio in the past, like people have been using it in, in big Citrix environments, was all about personalization. Like Gabe mentioned using mandatory profiles combined with roaming capabilities provided by Flex.

But we really went beyond that as soon as we started the Immidio company. So we had – That was actually the reason why we started Immidio. I mean, people were really asking from the community for a lot of features and a lot of enhancements, but it was simply not – We were not capable to do that from a consulting point of view. So that’s – We had a lot of ideas when we started Immidio from, from the start.

So from a, from a – It’s – We’re more moving towards the user environment management as a whole, and especially the release that will be available in two months. You will see that it’s not only the, the importing and exporting of personal settings, but we will be able to, to set the application states.

And that’s actually a feature that we have available right now. We call it application state management, where we can – With Griffin, we can easily let the administrator configure an application the way he likes it for the user without even having to touch the registry or doing any advanced stuff. And then easily push it out to any user, any environment, any type of profile they might be using.

And the nice thing of the application state management is that on an application level, you can actually put that application in a solid state, meaning that even if I have a roaming profile, each time I launch the application it will behave the way the IT department wants it. And for some applications that’s actually a, a very nice feature to have.

But yeah, I, I think it’s really a – As soon as we started introducing a mechanism that we call Direct Flex, which is actually comparable with what UE-V does, managing the application setting when an application launches instead of the log-on and log-off moment, so that’s actually one of the capabilities that a lot of people are not aware of that Immidio has these days.

So we built on top of that. So we can actually now manage a printer when you start an application. We can detach the printer when you close the application. We can set your offo-to-VC connection when you start an application, and so on.

So we really start, started building on top of the base functionality we released in our first commercial release from Immidio Flex.

Brian Madden: All right. And Rodney and I have a date set later this week with the WebEx, and we’re gonna sorta dig into that. Because I haven’t looked at Immidio Flex in some time, and I guess Rodney –

Rodney Medina: Yep.

Brian Madden: Is probably – I don’t know when I was last in Amsterdam and we had dinner together. That was six months ago now, I guess. It’s been a little while.

Rodney Medina: Yes.

Brian Madden: So I’ve got that, I’ve got that set and we will, we will take a look at Immidio in a, in a few days and I’ll sort of share, share the findings that, that you guys are working on.

Gabe Knuth: That’s not on my calendar. Let me know when that is.

Brian Madden: Oh.

Rodney Medina: Yeah.

Brian Madden: Yeah.

Rodney Medina: I’ll shoot out an invite to you guys later. There’s, there’s one thing that I, I – Really short that I wanted to mention. That one of the unique things that we are capable of doing these days is that we can actually migrate application versions back and forth. So we are actually capable of roaming your personal settings between, let’s say, Office 2007 on Windows XP and Office 2010 on Windows 7.

So that’s not only, that’s not only capturing the personalization because from our perspective these days, that that’s easy to do. But we’re actually, we introduced a mechanism where we can translate certain application settings. And it’s completely open, so people can customize that for their own custom applications as well.

Brian Madden: Do you think you will be able to do that for Windows RT?

Rodney Medina: Well, that all depends on what applications can we install on Windows RT, I guess.

Brian Madden: Yeah.

Gabe Knuth: That’s a good point.

Rodney Medina: So we’ve had that question a lot. We have had that question a lot and I am really also continuously digging in to the whole Windows RT and the, the store and what capabilities ISVs will have, actually, on that device. Because my belief, it’s going to pretty limited. So –

Brian & Gabe LIVE #25: Immidio's Rodney Medina joined us and we talk about Microsoft licensing and Windows RT

Brian Madden — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 04:01:00 GMT

Happy Tuesday! Today we welcomed Rodney Medina on Brian & Gabe LIVE. Rodney is a Microsoft MVP, BriForum speaker, and expert on App-V and user profile virtualization. He's currently the CTO of Immidio Software.

Our topics included:

Microsoft's User Experience Virtualization (UE-V)
Immidio Flex
Windows RT (WOA)
Microsoft's plan (or lack thereof) on tablets
Microsoft Licensing
Active Directory in the cloud

Video:

Part 1: Rodney Medina drops in to talk about Microsoft UE-V and Immidio

Part 2: Rodney Medina gives his thoughts on Windows RT

Part 3: We discuss how clueless Microsoft's new licensing and tablets strategy is

Part 4: Brian is convinced Active Directory is dead

UEM Smackdown: Head-to-head analysis of Appsense, Citrix, Immidio, Liquidware Labs, Microsoft, Quest, PolicyPak, RES, Scense, Tricerat and others - UPDATE January 2012

rspruijt — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:00:00 GMT

[NOTE: This article (and white paper) were just updated after originally being published in June 2011.] Are you looking for an independent overview of the User Environment Management solutions and curious about the different features and functions each vendor is offering!? This is the whitepaper you definitely must read! In the current market there is an increasing demand for unbiased information about User Environment Management solutions. The whitepaper is focused on solutions that are anticipated to have an important role in Desktop deployments. An overview of available features of each solution is created to better understand each solutions capability

The overall goal of this whitepaper is to share information about:

What is User Environment Management?!
Explain the pros and cons of User Environment Management
Describe the strategic questions and functionality of UEM solutions
User Environment Management functionality and solutions overview
Describe the different UEM vendors and solutions
Compare the functionality and features of various UEM solutions.

User Centric Computing

More and more customers are designing, building and maintaining hybrid-style, flexible Application and Desktop Delivery Solutions. Customers are using a mix of traditional desktops and laptops, Server Hosted Desktops using VDI and Remote Desktop Services, Web applications and Application Installation and Virtualization in a mixed Operating System environment. The devices are managed and, in a Bring Your Own Computer Scenario, un-managed. User Environment Management delivers and maintains the User Workspace in a clear, visible, predicatable, and profound way independent of the Application and Desktop Delivery concept and understands the context of the user Access Scenario. Having a clear view of the access scenarios, also known as personas, is essential and crucial for a complete Application and Desktop Delivery solutions. The focus on the user context:

Who: users, groups, personas
Which: Device: capability’s managed and un-managed
Where: Location: Online, Offline, offsite and onsite
What: Applications: IT and end-user driven, services, resources, data content
When: 24x7, specific times

This is essential and needs to be unified in a User Environment Management solution. Concentrate on the users Environment means User Centric Computing.
At the end of the day customer will have a hybrid Application and Desktop Delivery infrastructure. For the end-user, the business consumer, application access needs to be transperant. To create a transparent application,- and desktop delivery, and management, infrastructure it’s key to have a complete overview of the various “Access Scenarios”. These scenario's should contain:

User/Role/Persona
Applications/Services
Devices
Location
Context Awareness

Access scenarios need to be clear, profound and are part of the overall Application and Desk-top Delivery Design process.

The essence of User Environment Management (UEM).

Traditionally the endpoint is maintained with Client Management, or PC-life cycle management, solutions such as Altiris Deployment Solution, IBM BigFix, Microsoft SCCM, Novell Zen-Works and others. The key functionality of these kinds of products is: OS deployment, application deployment, asset management, inventory, integration with CMDB and remote control. The primary focus of the Client Management solutions is the client device and not primarily the end-user’s workspace.
Handling the User Environment, or User Workspace, isn’t in scope of the traditional approach of most of the Client Management Solutions. Large software vendors are so focused on the management and maintenance of ICT systems that they tend to forget the other important half, focus on the user side, of this management.
Users' needs to have a simple, uniform, fast and reliable workspace environment. Administrators would like to be able to manage this (Windows) workspace centrally, regardless of whether it is a physical or virtual workplace, implemented locally or centrally and whether the (Windows) applications are installed, streamed or virtualized. In many organizations the term ‘User Environment Management’ is still relatively unknown.

“User Environment Management (UEM) is a software solution that facilitates the management of the user environment and creates a dynamic, cost effective and for the business-consumer a transparent working environment . The focus is primarily on the end-user and his environment and not on the end user's device”.

Our experience is when the organization understands the meaning of user workspace management and sees the opportunities and benefits this provides to the users and the IT organization, the customer is often surprised that this solution has not been applied earlier.

Why UEM

In conversations with customers and during workshop sessions we regularly receive the question: “What are the primary reasons for implementing User Environment Management Solutions?”

Increase user experience, consistency across different platforms, VDI, SBC and local Laptops and Desktops.
Create a transparent User Environment independent of the various delivery solutions and empowers a smooth Desktop Transformation.
Improves end-user mobility, access personalized applications and settings from any machine, any Windows Operating System. Roaming users.
It stabilizes Windows user profiles.
Gain control over user profiles and truly manage them.
Accelerated and consistent logon times.
Makes migration from old to new Operating Systems and Application Delivery solutions easier. Even rollback scenario’s from a new Operating System back to an old system is possible.
Replace custom (legacy) scripts.
Central,- and uniform management of the User Environment is key and will result in happy administrators,- and users and lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Delegation of control is essential in such a management solution.
Provide better and granular support of user and application preference. Never delete or restore complete user profiles.
It controls, facilitates and enforces user access to applications, file types, (removable) devices, network and data resources. Applications can be Windows based and web-architected. The Windows Applications can be installed, Virtualized or Remote Executed via server-hosted VDI or Remote Desktop Services (Terminal Services).
Based on user location, device and custom settings, access to applications, data, net-work resources, devices and preferences is dynamically facilitated and from a security perspective enforced. User centric computing gains context awareness.
It facilitates Resource Management to control and optimize usage of CPU, Memory resources with focus on applications and (Virtual) Desktops.
End-user is able to install applications on his (virtual) desktop even without Administrator Rights. User Installed applications with Dynamic Privileges, ideal for BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and scenarios where dynamic application delivery in a static, - controlled desktop environment is needed.
It gives administrators and managers insights and reporting capabilities in Windows,- and Web applications, (virtual) desktop and license usage. It enforces license compliancy to various licensing models. Application licensing can be measured, tracked and enforced, or controlled, where needed.
Delivers detailed information on changes inside the User Environment Management environment that are needed as requirement for compliancy and certification standards such as Persona Information Acts (HIPAA), ISO 27001, SOX and NEN 7510

UEM Functionality

In a User Environment Management solution user personalization, applications and data need to be portable and context aware. The focus of UEM Solutions is the dynamic composition of the Users’ Environment. The environment, or workspace, is dynamically composed where the solution handles:

User Personalization, Application and Desktop Management; Application settings and configuration preferences, User Personalization such as printer settings.
Application and Access Control, Security Management; enforce access to applications, persona and context aware.
Resource Management; Application performance optimization and management.
User Profile Management; Manage Windows User profiles; local, roaming, hybrid, mandatory.
License Management; insights, reporting and enforcing the use of licenses.
Application Delivery: User centric Application Installation with Dynamic Privileges, User Installed Applications.
Monitoring, Auditing and Reporting facilities on various levels with focus on the user environment.
User support; facilitating user support

This functionality needs to be independent of:

Operating System version (e.g. Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008)
Processor architecture/platform (Intel 32,- and 64 bits)
Application Deployment (e.g. MSI, Application Virtualization, web-architected applications and Remote Delivery via VDI or Remote Desktop Services – and across any combination)
User Profile (e.g. local, mandatory, roaming)
Client Device (e.g. managed, un-managed)
User Context (e.g. online, offline, offsite, onsite scenario’s using Laptops, Desktop, Remote Desktop Services and VDI solutions with trusted and untrusted devices).

UEM Solutions Overview

There are quite some vendors in the “User Environment Management space”. The diagram below gives an overview of the focus of the various User Environment Management (UEM) software vendors. This diagram has nothing to do with the (possible) discussion which vendor provides the most and the best functionality and features. A complete overview of the features and functionality is available in the UEM Smackdown whitepaper – Feature Overview.

Get a head start! Download our complete, in-depth, and independent whitepaper "User Environment Management Smackdown: Head-to-head analysis of Appsense, Citrix, Immidio, Liquidware Labs, Microsoft, PolicyPak, Quest, RES, Scense, Tricerat, Unidesk and VUEM" (more than 100 pages). It's a lot of work to create this (free) whitepaper, please fill-in the contact information before downloading the whitepaper here. (thanks)

We did our best to be truthful, clear, complete and accurate in investigating and writing-down the different solutions. If you have any comments, corrections, or suggestions for improvements of this document, we want to hear from you. We appreciate your feedback. Follow Ruben on twitter or send him an email

Note from the author: I want to thank my fellow App-V MVP Aaron Parker (@stealthpuppy), various community members and PQR colleagues for their effort and support in reviewing this whitepaper!

What exactly is an "enterprise app store?" (No seriously... what is it?)

Brian Madden — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 11:19:00 GMT

There's a lot of talk about "enterprise app stores." I'm not sure what the exact definition of an enterprise app store is, but the analogy most used is something like "imagine Apple's iPhone App Store, except for corporate IT apps instead of consumer iPhone apps."

Proponents of enterprise app stores list several benefits, including:

Users can provision their own apps, so instead of entering a helpdesk ticket and waiting weeks for a new app, they can just click the icon in the app store and start using the new app immediately.
Apps in an enterprise app store are delivered via some form of app virtualization, so they can be used immediately without having to be "installed" and without the worry of them conflicting with existing apps.

There are several enterprise app stores on the market now:

Citrix Dazzle
Endeavors Technologies Application Jukebox
Immidio AppScriber
JackBe Presto
Others I'm missing... ?

In general I like the concept of user-provisioned IT and applications. But I have a problem with the concept of the enterprise app store: I don't understand how these app stores are different than existing app delivery products. How is an enterprise app store different than Citrix XenApp, for example?

With XenApp, I can build a web interface that links to icons for my applications. I can deliver locally streamed apps (via XenApp Streaming or App-V). seamless remote-hosted Apps (hosted on single-user VMs or as Terminal Server sessions), and web apps (via links to URLs). I can put them into groups and folders. There's a search functionality for users to find new apps.It seems to me that Citrix XenApp with a web interface is an enterprise app store. (And it seems like it has been since 1998.) So what's all the fuss about now?

It seems that in the future, these enterprise app stores will integrate with various workflow engines so that they can automate the approval and requisition process for new apps too. (So a user clicks on an app, it sends an email to his or her boss for approval. Once approved, it assigns a license and makes the app available to the user.) Of course products like this have existed for years in the traditional desktop space, but they (and the new enterprise app stores that offer this capability) suffer from the fact that automated workflows are something that sound great in theory but that require a lot of work in the real-world and overall have a lukewarm reception.

Some of these enterprise app store products integrate traditional apps too (MSI, etc.), so I guess maybe that's the overall value? And enterprise app store isn't much really—just a single common aggregation point for all corporate apps that a user might want to access? Am I missing anything?

It's not that I think the concept of the enterprise app store is bad per se. I'm more approaching this like, "Um, hello? We've been doing this since 1998. It's called Web Interface." But I guess now that the Apple App Store is popular we're seeing the rebranding and growth in the enterprise? (Much like how in 2007 Citrix decided that they'd been doing app virtualization since 1996.)

So is that it with the enterprise app store, or am I missing something. Do you use them (or plan to) in your company? If so, what's the specific value you get out of an enterprise app store that you can't get with something like XenApp web interface?

Brian Madden's full interview with Immidio's Benny Tritsch

Brian Madden — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 05:30:00 GMT

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Here's my full-length interview with Benny Tritsch from yesterday's Brian Madden TV Episode #28. In it we talk about Benny's new(ish) role at Immidio and what products they're working on now.

Brian Madden TV #28 - Interview with Benny Tritsch, "fifth vendor" voting results, and news round-up

Brian Madden TV — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:28:00 GMT

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In this week's Brian Madden TV, Gabe and Brian discuss Array Network's forthcoming iPhone remote desktop client, Citrix's Nirvana phone hardware spec, and the situation with RTO, Symantec, and VMware.

Then Brian interviews Benny Tritsch about the products he's building at Immidio. (Note, the full interview was about 30min, although we had to cut it down to 12min for the show. We'll post the full interview tomorrow.)

Finally, Brian and Gabe discuss the results of the "fifth vendor" voting for next month's "VDI Week."