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Category Archives: EUC Strategy

SMBs Prefer Horizon View Over Other VDI Solutions – Two Years in a Row

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By Courtney Burry, Director, Desktop Product Marketing, VMware

I’m excited to share that a recent study conducted by Spiceworks with small and midsized businesses (SMBs) revealed that VMware Horizon View is the solution of choice over the competition for a second year in a row.

By an almost 2-to-1 margin, Horizon View remains the top choice with the number of VDI agents deployed increasing from 53 percent in December 2011 to 57 percent in February 2013. The three leading VDI solutions found among SMBs were VMware Horizon View (57 percent), Citrix Virtual Desktop (31 percent) and NComputing vSpace Client (6 percent).

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School Testing: The Next Generation

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by Geoffrey Murase, Solutions Marketing for End-User Computing

When I was in elementary school, each year, we were administered a standardized test called the “California Test of Basic Skills” or CTBS.  This test involved using “number 2” pencils and filling out a form with boxes from A to E.  I remember thinking that if I didn’t know the answer, I should guess “C” because it’s in the middle.  Today, I can’t remember the last time I actually used a pencil.  However, many schools still use this antiquated way of administering standardized tests to students.

This is all about to change in the next couple of years.  According to the San Jose Mercury News, California, as one of 45 of the 50 states in the U.S. participating, will move toward a broad state-led program called the “Common Core State Standards Initiative.”  This initiative requires the standardization of testing across states by the 2014-2015 school year to ensure consistent performance assessments.  Quoting the article:

“Multiple-choice, fill-in-the-bubble tests alone simply cannot do the job anymore, and it’s time for California to move forward with assessments that measure the real-world skills our students need to be ready for a career and for college,” said California School Superintendent Tom Torlakson.

These next generation assessments will be computer-based and Pearson TestNav™ is a leading test delivery platform in K-12 schools that delivers over 4 million tests annually.  VMware is pleased to announce that our VMware® Horizon View™ desktop virtualization solution has received “TestNav Qualified” certification, ensuring that TestNav tests administered using Horizon View are delivered securely, error-free, and with a good user experience.  In fact, many schools have already deployed the TestNav platform with Horizon View and achieved great results:

“We’ve had tremendous success using VMware Horizon View for Pearson TestNav. Testing season brings a lot of stress to not only students but the staff as well. VMware Horizon View allows IT departments to facilitate these tests in a high availability environment, which is extremely comforting.”

- Brooks Moore, DCS Technology Help Desk Manager, Aledo Independent School District

“Using VMware Horizon View with the Pearson TestNav test delivery system ensures that our tests are administered in a secure environment that preserves the integrity of the results. Test environments are booted directly to our computer labs and if any attempt is made to escape out of the test, the test taker is locked out of the test. We initially rolled out VMware virtual desktops on a small scale in the Summer of 2012 but with the success that we’ve had, we now plan on rolling it out to all computer labs within our district.”

- Chad Branum, Executive Director of Technology, Coppell Independent School District

The good news is that these next generation assessments will hopefully give educators a clearer, more consistent understanding of how students are performing so that they can take corrective action where needed.  The bad news is that guessing “C” may no longer be an option for students in the coming years.

For more information about VMware and education, visit our website at: http://www.vmware.com/solutions/education/index.html

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NetApp has now introduced its VMware AlwaysOn Point of Care™ reference architecture built for healthcare

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by Monty Zarrouk, Product Marketing at NetApp

How will this improve patient care?

VMware® AlwaysOn Point of Care™ architecture helps solve customers’ problems by providing ready access to patient information from any terminal or mobile device. This allows clinicians to make informed decisions regarding treatment plans while protecting the confidentiality of patient information. Providing access to clinical applications in a virtual environment, healthcare providers maintain continued access to their desktop as they move from patient to patient, floor to floor, or building to building. Just like any sector, technology dictates a successful organization. And healthcare is no different. Medicine is changing, and a virtual desktop can mean all the difference in a patient’s outcomes.

Why did NetApp introduce VMware AlwaysOn Point of Care for healthcare?

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VDI Becomes A Reality for Hospitals

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by Steve Poitras, Solutions Architect, Nutanix

There are two things I normally notice when I visit the doctor – 1) a massive stack of paper medical records and 2) long visit times…

The need…

I’ve always been huge fan of adopting and evolving the IT services utilized in the medical industry.  Here we have an industry who is pushing the forefront of technology for the analysis and treatment of patients – but plagued by archaic IT and paper based records.

In comes the consumerization effect…

The Consumerization of IT has been a big trend for businesses in the last years, essentially giving the “end-user” the ability to have flexibility over devices.  When it comes down to it there are a few key things people care about:

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Always On. Always Available

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by by Pam Takahama, Director of Solutions Marketing, Riverbed Technology

Healthcare turning to VDI to improve patient care

I recently took my daughter to the doctor for an earache, and chuckled when the pediatrician reached into his lab coat for what I thought was an iPad to write up a prescription only to realize it was, ahem, a good ole’ fashioned pad of paper! Spending another 45 minutes filling the prescription had me wondering how far the healthcare industry has come in the last 10 years. Notwithstanding the isolated throwback to the pencil and paper era, the reality is that the healthcare industry is reinventing itself, and in the process reshaping our experiences, and reorienting our expectations from how care is managed, to how it is paid for, to how it is delivered.

Many healthcare organizations are working to embrace innovative solutions like virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to improve patient care and provide clinicians 24/7 access to their most current patient data and resources — even during unplanned downtime.

Recently, Riverbed and VMware announced a joint solution that integrates Stingray Traffic Manager application delivery controller (ADC) with the VMware® Horizon View™ AlwaysOn™ Desktop solution. The joint solution ensures end users have continual access to a secure virtual desktop no matter what device they use and no matter where they are.

Moreover, this tested and validated solution augments VMware’s latest announcement with a leading electronic medical records (EMR) software provider for a virtual clinical desktop. Designed for the cloud from the ground up, Stingray™ Traffic Manager will improve overall performance for clinical desktops by delivering around-the-clock access to data and applications even if a primary site fails or is compromised by other unplanned events, all while meeting industry compliance regulations. Customers will be able to quickly modernize their computing environment and provide a highly available cloud-based desktop.

Rx for AlwaysOn Desktop

As healthcare organizations seek to deliver robust and proven desktop solutions to improve how care is managed and delivered, they should consider the advantages that Stingray Traffic Manager offers to help lower costs while ensuring high availability and securing computing endpoints:

Accelerate virtual desktop performance. Offloads performance-draining tasks such as SSL and compression accelerating services, increasing capacity and optimizing implementations. Also, administrators can cache commonly requested content and optimize VDI traffic delivery, enabling healthcare clinicians to gain fast and easy access to their applications and data.

Provide 24/7 access to virtual desktops. By intelligently shaping and directing traffic and avoiding failed or degraded servers, Stingray Traffic Manager ensures users are always routed to the closest available site based on the end user’s geo-location, including continent and country, IP address, and site availability.

Secure virtual desktops. Helps to preserve and maintain a highly secure virtual desktop environment by configuring the solution to admit certain traffic types only, and operating as a deny-all gateway. These capabilities ensure full control over how traffic is internally routed. Additionally, high-performance inspection interrogates any part of a request or response before applying global filtering or scrubbing policies.

Gain better control of VDI environment. Easily manage how users interact with the applications and the infrastructure that they depend on. Administrators can also use Stingray Traffic Manager to shape, prioritize, and route traffic; drain infrastructure resources prior to maintenance; and, upgrade user sessions across application while preserving user performance.

So the next time I’m at the pediatrician’s office and he whips out a pad of paper again, I may have to bring new meaning to an old adage and tell him that “an Apple” a day may help keep the paperwork away.  Click here to learn more about the joint VMware and Riverbed AlwaysOn solution.

 

Achieving Epic Status

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by F5 News

Healthcare providers face a unique challenge: continuously deliver quality patient care that is both effective and affordable. Today, this depends largely on technology – from diagnostic systems to patient record systems accessible by health care professionals dispersed amongst hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies.

Today these organizations increasingly rely on new software solutions from companies like Epic Software to manage every aspect of patient care. Epic infrastructures are the gold standard today, assisting health care organizations around the world to improve patient care through accessible and reliable health care systems.

It is critical that such applications are supported by an equally accessible and reliable IT infrastructure. To assure a high level of quality from top to bottom, Epic carefully certifies IT infrastructure providers that support a disaster-resilient, highly available, secure and increasingly mobile deployment.

Because of its focus on quality, resilience and affordability it has become a great honor to achieve full target platform status with EPIC. And that’s what happened recently with VMware® Horizon View™ – the first desktop virtualization solution to have achieved this status. Using VMware’s AlwaysOn™ Desktop for Healthcare reference architecture, F5 partnered with VMware for this historic launch.

VMware and F5 have long been offering joint solutions targeting desktop virtualization with a focus on resiliency, scalability, availability, security and performance. Together, along with partners such as NetApp and EMC, these joint reference architectures are the basis for secure, fast and available virtualization infrastructures capable of meeting the most demanding standards, such as that of Epic Software.

F5 is also establishing and documenting jointly with Epic a set of best practices for application delivery, designed to improve the scalability and availability of the most common HTTP, SSL, and FTP Epic components. F5 will be providing these best practices both as technical documentation as well as an iApp, to streamline deployment of these critical healthcare systems.

We’re excited about this announcement and extend a hearty congratulations to VMware on this notable achievement.

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Paving the Way for VDI

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By: Courtney Burry, Director of PMM, VMware End-User Computing BU

In the past several years, many customers have turned to desktop virtualization in an effort to drive down costs and improve operational efficiencies.  This year, however, the tide has shifted. In a survey recently conducted by Forrester Research, Inc., and blogged about by David Johnson (Has VDI Peaked? A Change in the Adoption Drivers Sheds New Light, And New Life, April 1, 2013), the number one trigger for customer interest in VDI was actually around the need to support employee access across locations.

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Imprivata OneSign and VMware Horizon View: Streamlining access to EpicCare

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By James Millington, Director Product Management, Imprivata

Virtual desktops are gaining great traction in healthcare, a fact supported by the announcement that VMware® Horizon View™  has been awarded Target Platform status for Epic Hyperspace

The reason for this uptake, is that desktop virtualization is delivering compelling value across the spectrum of healthcare users and decision makers.

Imprivata and VMware have partnered closely in a number of healthcare environments including Johns Hopkins and Metro Health to deliver a combination of functionality that streamlines clinical workflows, helps meet compliance goals and provides flexibility for users and IT.

Lets take a look at the 2 predominant workflows that we see in EMR environments and consider some of the benefits. The first workflow is the workflow that we see in inpatient settings, the roaming desktop workflow. Here we have care providers moving quickly between nurse’s stations, patient rooms, treatment rooms, physician’s lounges etc. The combined Imprivata OneSign and Horizon View environment enables users to simply tap a badge and bring their desktop with them exactly as they left it. Not having to re-launch the EMR application, not having to re-navigate to the patient record. When you consider that care providers may log into different devices up to 70 times in a shift, OneSign authentication combined with desktop roaming is (arguably) the most compelling use case for this technology in any industry, creating compelling time savings and enabling providers to focus on patients, not technology. For IT you have the benefits of centralized data, no PHI left on the endpoint devices to potentially walk out of the hospital with a stolen computer, helping to limit the number of ways data breaches may occur and helping to reduce the potential for hefty PHI breach fines. For clinical leadership, they have care providers that feel that IT is doing something to help them, providing them with a system that works with them, not against them and helps encourage the use of the EMR and work together towards Meaningful Use dollars.

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Introducing VMware Ready Devices on Verizon Wireless

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By Srinivas Krishnamurti, Senior Director of mobile product management, End-User Computing, VMware




Today I’m very excited to announce the immediate availability of two VMware Ready devices – LG Intuition and Razr M by Motorola – on Verizon Wireless.  These devices are now equipped with VMware’s virtualization technology required to run our dual personal solution, VMware Horizon Mobile.  This is an important milestone for VMware as we deliver on our end-user computing vision of managing users, not devices.  We will continue to work closely with Verizon Wireless to enable a broad set of new and existing devices to be VMware Ready. You might be asking yourself what is a VMware Ready device?  Well, in this blog I will provide a quick overview of Horizon Mobile and VMware Ready program.

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Blazing New Trails with Horizon Workspace

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By Moe Khosravy, Vice President of Product Management, End-User Computing, VMware

 

 

A quarter has almost passed since we first introduced Horizon Suite and VMware continues to be the only vendor in the market offering a suite with a level of integration unmatched by any other solution.

The industry is beginning to acknowledge our efforts and leadership in end-user computing, most recently in CITEworld with an article titled “The audacious vision of VMware Horizon: Manage access, not devices,” among many others that have also highlighted our brave new approach. But it doesn’t stop there.

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