Adventures in home working

I picked up a few useful bits of information during iForum this week:

1. Citrix predict that between 30 and 50% of people will be mobile by 2010
2. Some form of rights management is required when delivering to unmanaged PCs.  For example XenApp has a type of rights management, ie it can disable cut and paste, save to local PC disk, Print etc based on the results of a NAC check.  Microsoft have a much richer rights management solution, but its not currently integrated with NAC, nor can it be applied to all applications.  My thought perhaps SoftGrid execution environment could be NAC and rights management enabled, and therefore prevent certain things on unmanaged PCs
3. 10% of people poled in a couple of sessions had increasing IT budgets
4. 60% of people are expected to be working either from home or in branch offices by 2010
5. There were 1.2B mobile phones in 2007, expected to be 1B SmartPhones by 2010
6. 47% of companies now consider data protection now more important than perimeter security, again another hint at the potential growth of rights management if it could be made seamless enough for people who have rights!
7. An IDC study was quoted that predicted that knowledge workers would be working with 60% of their information sourced from outside the company within 5 years.  I can really relate to this, I think I’m way beyond that ratio already and this >60% is part of my personal knowledge management system, not my companies, although some small part of it is relevant to share.

I’ve been trying to work through the key questions that need to be answered about VDI by anyone comparing it to the obvious alternatives, these being:

1. A laptop
2. A physical desktop
3. A client side virtual machine, copied or streamed to the PC
4. A web application portal
5. A server hosted desktop

Whilst I can see use cases where all of the above are great solutions, it’s not immediately obvious how the decision making process should work in the enterprise.  To start off here’s a short discussion of the  alternatives:

1. A laptop’s a great solution for someone who doesn’t want to work a fixed work locations, but rather wants the flexibility to work shoulder to shoulder with a colleague, work in conference rooms, hotels, the back garden etc.  Clearly it’s also the only solution for people working with unreliable or no network connection.  I see this workstyle being pretty standard for many knowledge workers going forward.
2. A physical desktop seems most at threat from VDI, it doesn’t offer any particularly compelling attributes, until you start to think about the future of the desktop.  Practically unlimited encrypted storage, low power consumption, support for operating system streaming or iSCSI boot, massive computational capacity.  If someone could figure out how to drive real productivity improvements by using all that storage and processing power then we might easily see the desktop swing back into favour.  Even if the desktop PC continues to be used pretty much as it is today It’s not unreasonable to consider the desktop as essentially a VDI client, streaming OS, Apps and Environment on demand in a very VDI like way but just without all of that server and storage infrastructure.
3. I’ve used client side virtual PCs for years, but I wouldn’t want to do all my work on one.  My gut feel is that this will change by 2009 when we will see client side hypervisors readily available and these hosting one or more personal VMs and an enterprise VM thats either streamed to the client, along with streamed apps and environment or just managed as if it were a physical PC, just easier to fix.
4. A web application portal is my favourite way to get at all the “enterprise” applications that I use.  I have no desire to go back to using an enterprise desktop.  Just give me my personal laptop and Internet access and I’m away.  CSC provides me with a portal that fronts expenses, procurement, email, collaborative services etc, and I get a backup solution for my PC that provides an Internet accessible web site for me to access/recover all my documents in the event of a hardware failure or loss/theft of my laptop.
5. A server hosted desktop, most often XenApp provides a locked down environment that meets the needs of many users, and at a price point that VDI can’t reach.  Of course for enterprises that just want to publish applications, it provides a great solution for that too.

Ok after rambling through the alternatives I think I’m ready with my list of key questions:

1. Do you need a solution that costs less than the money you will save by replacing desktop PCs?  If yes then it’s unlikely that VDI is for you unless the desktop PCs are particularly difficult to support, like those in remote branch offices or home locations.  The marginal saving of removing a PC is pretty low when automated tools are used for management.
2. Do your users really want a desktop?  Lots of users who are using a PC as their client device don’t want another desktop, they just want the applications published to them and integrated into their desktop experience.  Microsoft recently ran a trial of their Server 2008 product which offers secure Internet access to applications with “seamless windows” and a full published desktop.  Most users just wanted to use seamless applications.  As I explained above in CSC we just publish web applications.  As consumerization takes hold expect lots of users to prefer to use their own PC for access and look to the enterprise just for the apps they need.  Of course publishing a full desktop costs more, but it does offer a more secure environment and a more controlled end to end user experience.
3. Do you really want windows applications?, if your users needs are simple - and many people looking at VDI keep saying all my users need is email and Office - then perhaps all they really need is a good web email and a well integrated web office suite, and that’s way cheaper than any virtual desktop solution.
4. Do you already have a well managed desktop environment in place?  if you do it’s fairly easy to just deploy a VDI environment to essentially just “provision virtual machines” from that point onwards you might well find it’s cheaper to manage them like every other PC on your network.  You can’t do this with XenApp so unless you already have a well managed XenApp environment in place you will probably find that XenApps infrastructure cost advantage is written off by increased OS and Application management costs.
5. Do your users need to personalise their desktop?  lots of people seem to think that users want VDI because they want to “personalise” their desktop.  Well by personalise most people mean installing applications and many enterprises frown on that.  It might be better to provide two environments,  one that’s locked down and includes enterprise applications and another that’s essentially personal.   This is expensive if you use VDI to provide both of these, or use VDI for one and XenApp for the other, but its not too bad if you provide your users with an allowance to go buy their own laptop and then provide them with VDI, a client side VM, XenApp or a web portal.
6. What are your availability needs? An office full of desktops and laptops can offer a very high level of aggregate availability (for example 95% of an offices PCs might reasonably be available 99.999% of the time) but a VDI or Server hosted desktop environment won’t deliver this level of availability to the desk without a lot of investment.  Not many people need this level of availability, but if you do it’s an important consideration.
7. When does VDI make sense?  Even if VDI isn’t the right solution today, its going to get cheaper - of course PC’s are going to get cheaper - or at least use less power - and more secure and easier to manage as well.

Ok so I’ve rambled on a bit more,  if you answered the questions above and still want VDI it’s likely that you have a lot of expensive desktop PCs to replace and/or you want to increase security, flexibility and agility and you want to do it now.

Time for me to offer up what I thinks going to happen:

1. A lot more laptops,  I think perhaps 30-50% in many enterprises
2. Initially a lot of edge cases where VDI makes really good sense, you might say “the places that traditional desktops and laptops find hard to reach”
3. Some enterprises that have very large desktop user populations today, who don’t have a rich mobility requirement, but do have a large and complex legacy application portfolio will be tempted to move to VDI now
4. Users who do get VDI will get a smartphone as well, or at least get access to email, presence, IM etc on their own smartphones.  perhaps the smartphone will have a bunch of virtualized client applications on its USB drive that can be accessed from any PC, including the VDI client software
5. Within a year VDI costs will have fallen a bit, but not enough.  Desktop PC TCO will have fallen as well and security and manageability will have increased making VDI more expensive again, but with fewer advantages.
6. The app streaming, environment streaming and OS streaming infrastructure that represents the most sophisticated VDI implementations today, will support desktop PCs and ultimately portables as well.  At this point client device choice matters a lot less, and of course it’s then not either or.  It’s simply a matter of right device, anytime, any place.  if I’m a laptop user but I need to quickly access a large file I can run up a VDI environment on demand, laptop gets stolen no problem, just spin up a VDI session for a week and then stream everything back to my new laptop when it arrives.

I’m currently working on our Mobile working strategy and by chance I happened to be reading Hominids which has a wonderful description of a mobile Companion device and sensors.  The concept of use was pretty inspirational and reminded me of the even more futuristic vision of “Jane” in the Ender books.

Anyway the point of this post is to point out this very interesting article about a concept that Apple has for making the iPhone even more of a lifecycle companion.  It’s only a small step towards the companion described in Hominids, but its a good early indicator.  One can only admire Apples Strategy and Execution and this article makes a good case for why they will be very difficult to beat in the rich mobile experience space.

My conclusion is that it’s definitely going to be personal use cases that dominate the selection criteria for mobile devices for the majority pretty soon and that enterprise integration is just going to be a nice to have feature.  That’s not the case yet for me, because the Blackberry still provides such a superior Mobile Lotus Notes experience, but it won’t be long (hopefully) before this evolves to a similar plug and play experience (ie most Smart Phones are enterprise as standard and just need to plug into the appropriate enterprise service) that Microsoft ActiveSync provides.

I’m a mobile worker and a happy one, but I can imagine that lots of mobility projects just provide more burdens on the time of already stressed out employees.  The whole always on, can’t go 5 minutes without email culture seems to be replacing face to face contact and telephone conversations. 

I’ve seem a whole load of business cases for mobile devices that rest on efficiency improvements that are only achieved by displacing real-time collaboration, thinking time and relaxation.

So I was very pleased to see HP take the initiative and set up a collaboration with The Chief Happiness Officer under the banner Business runs better on happiness.  HP have taken a few useful first steps:

Our happiness experiment had two parts. First, we surveyed 800 workers, from companies with up to 100 employees, to find out what would make them happy. They might be shy of telling their boss, but they didn’t pull any punches with us. Second, we subjected volunteers to an experiment that tested people’s responses to different working environments

and they have provided the research online:

» Read about our experiment and its results

» Find out more about our research

» Read the Happy People press release

I have read a little on the results of their research, and to be honest it doesn’t surprise me, although I also don’t think it’s that reliable as the subjects probably responded as much to the attention they were receiving and the novelty as they did to the changes.  However in my personal experience I have seen significant improvements from simillar changes, here’s a snip:

The same workers, given the freedom, tools and trust to work in a more ‘free-range’ style, experienced a dramatic improvement in their mental wellbeing. The results were startling:

• Productivity shot up by 400 percent
• Stress levels fell by more than 50 percent
• IQ scores increased by an average of 28 percent
• Blood pressure was lower
• Short term memory improved. Volunteers retained 33 percent more information

Alexander also announces the news on his blog.  In particular I liked this offer:

As part of its ongoing ‘Happy People’ marketing campaign, HP will be providing free consultancy to UK businesses on how to improve ‘happiness’ within the office through the use of HP mobility technology.

Strange though it might seem I think handling of audio is one of the weakest features of every SmartPhone I have ever had.  These are some of the things I want to do:

1. Listen to music or Podcasts, with automatic bookmarking so I don’t loose my place.  While listening I want to be able to interrupt my flow and without touching my phone (but I don’t mind pressing a button on my headset) I want to be able to:
1. Answer calls and pause my music
2. Make calls using voice recognition and pause my music
3. Listen to GPS instructions and pause my music
4. Take a voice note and pause my music
2. While on a call I want to be able to:
1. Be heard on a windy day or when there’s other background noise
2. Mute and un-mute that call without touching the phone, but again I don’t mind pressing a button on my headset
3. Record a segment of the call
4. Conference someone else into the call
3. While writing an email I want to be able to:
1. Record a voice note and email that instead of writing on the tiny keyboard

This article also provides some interesting future scenarios for audio, concentrating on the hardware and sharing of audio.  This article links to it and has a good comment thread.

It’s really nice to see some progress at last on SSE, ie it’s implementation by Microsoft as FeedSync. Jon Udel covers it.  Of course right now there are no examples of it really being used, but maybe the creation of FeedSync was needed before people would really consider it stable enough to invest in - lets hope so.

While I was at my in-laws this weekend I didn’t have broadband so I installed OnSpeed to improve performance of my GPRS connection.  I have been pretty impressed, here are the main advantages:

1. For me OnSpeed seems to compress data by an average of 3-4 times, of course OnSpeed claims more!
2. This means on my capped Orange GPRS/3G data connection I can now stay online all the time that I am out of the house and browse quite a bit and not really worry about hitting my cap
3. It also means that browsing is significantly faster
4. It seems to have a much better estimate of GPRS data usage than my 3G Watcher program
5. It’s transparent in use

What’s the catch:

1. It costs £24.99/year which I think is a good deal when you consider how much GPRS per MB data costs are
2. Images are compressed, the quality is slightly reduced, but its not been an issue for me so far
3. You can block adverts if you want more compression, which I personally think is a good thing, although the Maxthon ad blocker is better
4. It seems to slow browsing down slightly when I’m on my fast ADSL connection,  you can disable it, but its not significant enough for me to bother disabling it