Ponder This

Saturday November 11, 2006

Ponderings from VMworld 2006

VMworld 2006 is in the books as they say. It was quite the event.VMware went all out with the parties. Including renting Universal Studios with an open bar. Very impressive. The conference itself was great. VMware had some really good breakout sessions, from the feedback I have received. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend any of them. My session was well attended and I was very pleased with the turnout.

There were a ton of questions, as I expected. There was a lot of follow up at the booth afterwards as well. I always use my voice as a gage of how much traffic has come through. By the second night it was almost about to give out which usually tells me I have told the story quite a few times. Curtis was there from the US as well as Dirk from Germany and they were also talking it up. Proving we had a number of people interested in what we have to offer.

 The big buzz was unquestionably desktop virtualization. Diane Greene - President of VMware made it very clear in Tuesdays  keynote that desktop virtualization is happening now and taking off. I strongly recommend you visit VMware's website and  look at the presentation from the keynote.

The feedback from existing Sun customers and the ones that had no idea we offered compelling desktop solutions, was very clear. WOW you guys are doing some really cool stuff. Of course, I am slightly biased and agree we are doing some cool stuff. We also have some work to do too make it better in my opinion. There was only a small handful of people that had requirements that we could not meet and I actually recommended they consider another solution. We are  not going to be the best fit for everyone and this is OK. I did find it ironic though, one of them kept coming back with more questions.

I have a pretty good idea of what  others are doing with their solutions. Most of which, I have started calling a "Desktop on a Desktop". Guess what? The customers are as well! Customers are smart, they are not stupid and I knew it was only a matter of time before they bushwhacked through most of the hype around some of the other solutions out there. Several people made it very clear our solution is the only solution that provides a seemless user experience and appears to be the most streamlined. I try to be fair, we know where our gaps are and I really make an effort not to hide them. I make it clear where we feel we need to improve and listen closely to customers about where they would like to see our solution improve.

What really surprised me, was the shear number of smaller boutique type " Session Brokers " that have come to market. What is more surprising is how many of these are simply taking the Remote Desktop Web Connection software from Microsoft, front ending it with a custom branded web page and calling it a product. They are actually trying to sell this to people as a " Session Broker "  with little to no value add wrapped around it. I usually keep quite about things like this but, this is lame. They are also trying to OEM their " Session Broker " to other vendors. I expect most of these players and I stress players :) will drop out of the game in short time and will be long forgotten.

Maybe we need to post a Desktop Virtualization Questionnaire that gives customers a list of questions to ask these companies. A few to start off with could be.

Does your session broker for connecting to XP require ActiveX?

Does your session broker  for connecting  to XP require that I use a web browser?

Does your session broker require that my thin client run and embedded operating system?

Here is a good one!

If you do not use your own proprietary protocol or an open protocol to communicate with XP can you explain more about your RDP agreement with Microsoft?

Just something to ponder........