Cloud computing to fly?

Cloud computing simply becomes another way to fragment and further complicate an already complicated IT infrastructure unless it is done properly and the organisation moving to hosted infrastructure understands exactly what they will receive.

I see Cloud computing being excellent for the SME market where their internal IT resources may not be experts on subjects such as Exchange, Office communications server, Sharepoint etc or the SME has no expertise at all and relies on IT expertise as required from SME IT specialists.

For large companies who are likely to have experienced Windows Server administrators and who maintain very high availability figures for their customer; the benefits of hosted infrastructure are diminished.
Unless there is a cost saving, the larger the company is the better their economies of scale are already and there is more reason to keep systems inhouse with internal IT staff.
Cloud vendors have to make money and as margins tighten, their internal staff to end customer ratio drops; or the vendor offshores the support of the infrastructure, where quality may diminish to the point where the original reason for migrating to the Cloud becomes a moot point.
Once a customer is at this point, what is their return path? Which Cloud vendors are offering data export services? My experience is a vendor will not help a customer migrate from their platform (it is not in their interest to) so what do I do as the data owner?

Desktop applications as they are currently licensed and used are often not suitable for cloud computing and while a user still has a local PC or Laptop with the ability to run all the applications they require locally, the transition to cloud based apps will not be easy.
An OS license may already be consumed by the client pc and if running local applications another license for each application is required, ramping up the cost of providing an economical solution.
If history teaches anything, Citrix was the last great money saver for IT departments and its adoption was not high, many customers had small Citrix implementations inhouse for particular users and applications but very few rolled it out as it was intended - to save money on hardware refresh and desktop management as new PC's still needed to be purchased.

Maybe a hybrid approach will prevail where a customer will purchase hosted email for example with the Outlook client published using Citrix Presentation server or Quest vWorkspace, the Outlook application never actually belongs to the end user but the full functionality of Outlook is available. Specialist Applications like http://www.xero.com or http://www.salesforce.com are well designed for hosted platforms not Visio or a Enterprise Discovery application.

Lastly I believe that only certain tasks are suitable for hosting, hosting a managed desktop for the majority of users I can't see being a viable long term option unless the hardware providing the solution is provided inhouse as some hybrid hosted solutions are now doing.

Virtualization to save my company money?

Working for a software vendor puts me in touch with many different customers every day, most looking to save money and looking to the market and vendors to provide them with the product to reduce cost.

Unfortunately vendors want a customer to buy their products which makes them biased and not a wholly reliable / neutral reference.

A market was created a few years ago and touchingly labeled ‘Virtual Desktop Infrastructure’ (or VDI) and at first glance looked to be a huge benefit to any organisation struggling with high IT administrative costs and burgeoning desktop sprawl, but does it?

The historical ‘King of the Hill’ was Citrix who licensed Terminal Services to Microsoft and continues to package Citrix as many feature enhancements over MS Terminal Services alone.

Microsoft Terminal Services with a broker like Quest vWorkspace or Citrix is a solution that reduces the Total Cost of Ownership (or TCO) of Desktop Hardware if deployed intelligently, its easily proven:

Maintaining older desktops for users, reduction in hardware purchases

Centralised application servers, no application breakages for end users, lower support

Centralised management, One IT administrator can do the job of many desktop support engineers

Lower power consumption, older machines tend to require less power (to a point)

Citrix Servers are mid class hardware, not beefy very standard servers

For 80% of an organisation user base, a Terminal server based environment will provide all the applications that are required (MS Word, Excel, Outlook, Internet Explorer, financials).

A single Terminal server can provide applications for 40-50 users with no more than 4 GB ram and a modern dual core processor.

For Virtual desktop virtualization, the whole equation changes instead of the above a single server now requires 32 GB ram to support 50-60 users, significantly more CPU cores are required and as each virtual desktop is an entity in its own right, management becomes only slightly more efficient than actual physical desktops.

Energy costs are substantially more than a TS based solution

Administration is no different to individual desktops

Application deployment relies on whatever deployment technology deployed, effectively desktop application deployment.

Hardware costs for the VMware servers are substantial, Ram and multi-socket servers are vastly more expensive than a commodity dual core server.

Substantial disk space is required for each Virtual Desktop client (10-20 GB per desktop)

One day I will do a cost comparison, For the moment the above is purely my opinion, there is a place for Virtual desktops (20% of a user base) where users require custom applications that may have a specific hardware requirement. But in many cases a TS based solution with the RDP enhancements a product like Quest vWorkspace provides allows a full desktop experience for a Terminal server based infrastructure while allowing Brokering services to Virtual desktops and Application Virtualization from many vendors.