Why Microsoft Might Just End Up Owning the Future

The past two years have seen an arms race at the high end of the virtualization arena. The biggest players in the space have competed furiously to add features and capabilities to their combined platform offerings, either by swallowing up smaller companies or investing heavily in product development. MDM, DaaS, hybrid cloud, profile management, application …

Death to Active Directory? Is the Windows Domain Still Relevant in the Modern IT World?

In a meeting recently, I was quite taken aback to hear a reason given for not moving to 2012 R2 forest functional level—a reason to which I hadn’t previously been privy. The stated reason was, “in a few years, the Windows domain won’t be relevant anymore.” As someone who cut his IT teeth on Windows …

The Impact of the IaaS Price Wars

Public cloud IaaS providers are competing heavily on price. Watching Google, AWS, and Microsoft play the falling prices game is like watching a ping-pong match. It is just a matter of time before IBM’s SoftLayer matches the prices as well. Adrian Cockcroft wrote a great piece called The Real Story Behind the Cloud Price War, …

Winds of Change: What Does Horizon 6 Mean for Microsoft and Citrix?

At first glance, it looks like VMware’s recently announced Horizon 6 platform is an admission by VMware that applications, rather than desktops, do matter, and that Citrix has been on the right track all along. Certainly, XenApp has been a thorn in the side of many VMware View implementations through the years, allowing people to …