End-of-Year Roundup

This has been an eventful year, with lots going on. This is an end of year roundup. It is the year when second-order analytics and machine learning became commonplace. The year when artificial intelligence became more than just a daydream. It has been a year of some extremely nasty attacks, ones that nearly took out …

Year in Review – Moving to the Cloud?

The “cloud” has become quite the buzz word and in all appearances truly loved by the marketing side of the fence also. “Take it to the cloud.” That is one of my favorite lines from a Microsoft commercial campaign that I think really shows how mainstream the cloud has become. Facebook, iTunes, Twitter, Oxygen, Amazon and Acronis are all examples of different cloud services that I connect to on a regular basis. Services for the end users are becoming more and more abundant, which is absolutely fantastic for us, the consumer.

Year in Review – Virtualization Security

2011 saw a shift in how virtualization security was viewed and it showed in the way companies teamed up to address those needs. Even so, the most basic of issues still exist: The thought that once you virtualize you are more secure, and the lack of general protection for the management constructs of a virtual or hybrid environment. These two concepts have hindered adoption of virtualization security in 2011. Even so, there has been a steady shift through out the year as more and more companies talk about virtualization security. VMware has definitely lead the pack with its vShield Product line and its unified view of virtualization security. Other hypervisor vendors are also discussing virtualization security through their ecosystem if not directly. 2011 saw many companies forging their own partnerships to augment and compete in this space. Will these partnerships continue into 2012? Will virtualization security continue to be a hot area?

2011 Year in Review Desktop Virtualization – Part I

The countdown clock for the end of life of windows XP (the most successful operating system of all time) is running; enterprise IT is having to adjust to multiple disruptive trends that will stress it as never before, mobility, security, smart phones, tablets, BYOD, the cloud, even Apple has found a foothold in the enterprise. Budgets are tight, unemployment is high, mistakes cannot be afforded. This is the 2011 Year in Review for Desktop Virtualization.

Desktop virtualization, a year in review

The desktop virtualization year opened with a bang at CES with the explosion of vendor announcements introducing the next generation of mobile tablets. The obvious winner this year being Apple and the iPad but with many more vendors showing off Windows-based tablets including HP, Archos and Pegatron, as well as Android tablets from manufacturers such as Archos (again), Compal, Dell, HP (again), and Motorola. The key challenge of course being the delivery of existing enterprise applications onto these platforms, something that’s desktop virtualization and presentation virtualization is ideally suited for. The inescapable consequence of this was a steady stream of announcements from Citrix, VMware, and Wyse as they leapfrogged each other’s announcements on availability, functionality, and usability of their respective mobile tablet client offerings. The level of competitiveness here producing major benefits for potential adopters as each strove to outdo the other in terms of user experience innovation and performance.

Virtualization Review 2010

It is the last few days of the year and time for a review of virtualization 2010. Although VMware was founded in 1998 it was not until 2001 that I first heard of VMware and played with the workstation product to be able to run different flavors of Linux. So for me, 2010 closes out a great year in virtualization as a whole as well as a decade of virtualization and what a ride it has been.