Cover Feature | Virtualisation
Noman Qadir Regional Channel Manager Citrix System, MENA & Turkey
resources is seen as a key driver of desktop virtualization. This enables organizations to have an effective mobile workforce. Applications, data and entire desktops are centralized in the data-center and delivered as an on-demand service to people in any location, on any device. Desktop virtualization has seen faster penetration in select verticals like call centres, education, Banks with remote branches etc for reasons of ease of manageability and security. Norman says, “In the last couple of years, there has been a faster momentum towards desktop 20
The Integrator | April 2012
virtualization with Customers who are trying to host windows desktops and deliver them remotely. This momentum has been particularly more in environments with more mobile users and those which have work shift environments. So call centres have been one of the largest customer verticals for us in the region.”
night whereas managers may be power users with access to more applications. IT management could become a nightmare if there are more branches with around 20 users in each and therefore would require more support staff and expensive remote management tools. Desktop virtualisation fits it well in these scenarios."
According to him, desktop virtualization can enable call centre agents to now work from home and any PC, device. They should be able to virtually access their desktops and have other services like IP telephony integrated in their virtual desktops. Education is another important vertical for desktop virtualization and helps IT administrators tide over the challenge of addressing IT issues in local client machines.
Norman claims that the virtual desktop licensing booking for us Citrix was over five times larger than its nearest competitor in 2011.
“Our virtual desktops offer complete flexibility to students and teachers and when the next batch of students walks in for their Lab sessions, we renew the desktop and offer new virtual desktops on the fly. That takes care of any potential issues that could crop up otherwise,” adds Norman.
Multiple options The notion of multiple hypervisors which are the pivots of virtualization deployments is gaining ground. A hypervisor, also known as a virtual machine manager/monitor (VMM), is the software that allows several operating systems to share a single hardware host.
Further, Banks with remote branches are also seen as potential clients for desktop virtualization. This could be for some user profiles at least since that would help curtail the management issues dealing with a large number of individual PCs. Norman adds, “If you look at Banks, they have different kinds of users and further their security and compliance needs for both Business and IT security are going through the roof. Tellers may have access to a few applications from morning to
Jean Phillipe Barleaza Partner Director Southern Europe, EMEA, VMware