Are You Part of The Inside Track?

Have you heard about The Inside Track? I first heard about The Inside Track back in July 2017, when I received an email invitation to join a new LinkedIn group called “The Inside Track – End User Computing” from my friends and colleagues over at Liquidware Labs—or just Liquidware, as they like to be referred to now. Curiosity ended up getting the better of me, and I started to do a little research to see what I could discover about The Inside Track.

As it turns out, Liquidware is the founder and an inaugural cosponsor of The Inside Track, along with IGEL and NVIDIA as the other inaugural cosponsors. The vision and initial concept for The Inside Track were for it to be a new and exclusive community for the end user computing (EUC) influencers. These influencers comprise people who are outspoken bloggers, media types, and industry and technology community influencers. To bring everyone together, Liquidware, NVIDIA, and IGEL hosted The Inside Track inaugural event at VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The Inside Track event got things started with some socializing and pre-dinner drinks, which I am sure helped stimulate some interaction between the influencers and some of the representatives from the cosponsors. Once everyone had the opportunity to socialize, the evening continued with a nice dinner over some interesting technical presentations from the cosponsors that highlighted the new technologies from those companies and the contributions each of them were making to help drive and improve the end user computing technology segment.

Each of these companies showcased some exciting and interesting new technologies this year. Liquidware demoed the latest versions of the award-winning UEM, app layering, and visibility solutions in its portfolio, including ProfileUnity, FlexApp, and Stratusphere. NVIDIA shared advancements it has made with its software and hardware solutions and highlighted the positive effects the new graphics processing unit (GPU) was having with GPU-accelerated computing models. IGEL focused on its endpoint management software and its ability to convert any x86 device and control every device from one easy-to-manage platform that instantly works in your preferred environment, which will help with faster rollouts and seamless integration.

A point was made sometime during the evening that I found to be quite an interesting and profound statement—or could I say concept in its own right. In a nutshell, the point was that we are all in this together. I am sure we have all heard that statement at one time or another during our journey through life. What made this statement a little different was that the comment was not made from a company to the community, but rather from a company to other companies. Let that sink in for a second. It is not the user community members working with each other to make things better, but companies assisting other companies in making end user computing a better experience for all.

This is what really got me thinking. When it comes to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), one of the greatest performance advancements has been the introduction of the GPU in this virtual space. Offloading the processing needed for the graphics to a dedicated processor increases the performance and scalability of the virtual desktop infrastructure. This has given Liquidware, for example, the ability to have insight into the virtual GPU (vGPU) for diagnostics and monitoring of the end user workloads in order to provide better support for trending, optimizing, and diagnosing the challenges faced in next-generation end user workspaces. These advancements help all the VDI providers—like Microsoft, Citrix and VMware, to name a few, as well as other third-party companies that make up the EUC communities.

I believe we are in the partnership phase in the industry, especially when it comes to VDI. As a case in point, there was a recent announcement to get ready for VMware Horizon Cloud on Microsoft Azure. In my opinion, this is just the start of the partnership trend. I imagine there will be more to come as we move ahead into a more hybrid cloud world. With a hybrid world come more hybrid integrations. I think we will get to a point at which we will see more companies with a more musketeer-type attitude. All for one and one for all as we become more a part of The Inside Track.