Courtney Burry, Group Product Marketing Manager, End User Computing BU
Ensuring branch office users have efficient access to the technology they need has always been a challenge. Not only is it costly to manage IT directly out of each branch office, it’s also unrealistic for many organizations with limited resources. Enter desktop virtualization, which offers IT the opportunity to centralize and streamline the desktop management overhead while securely delivering applications and data to end users in remote and branch locations across the WAN.
Traditionally, desktop virtualization has had its challenges for these remote and branch office users. Many branch offices don’t have the best connectivity and often there’s insufficient bandwidth to support multiple end users accessing their applications without performance and productivity reductions. Separating desktops in the datacenter from local print and app servers in the branch can also slow application response times. And some users within the branch are just not good candidates for VDI – perhaps, like a sales team, they need to work off line sometimes, or maybe they need to use legacy peripheral devices such as those found in many retail outlets, bank branches or even at airport check-in desks.
Suffice to say, these challenges affect many branch employees today. In fact, stats from Infonetics last year showed that there are more than 11 million branch offices distributed across the globe – this is why finding a better way to manage all these branch-office users has become so critical.
The VMware Branch Office Desktop
The VMware Branch Office Desktop will provide a comprehensive approach to addressing multiple requirements within the branch office. With VMware Mirage™, IT organizations can centrally manage OS images for both their physical end points and their virtual desktop environments, while ensuring employees have fast, secure access to the applications and data they need to maximize productivity. With centralized images and layered single-image management, the same base image can be deployed in a server hosted virtual desktop, natively to a physical PC, or even on a client hypervisor.
Not unlike the VMware View Mobile Secure Desktop, the AlwaysOn Point of Care Desktop and the newly announced Business Process Desktop, the VMware Branch Office Desktop will equip customers with a blueprint for successfully addressing specific end user computing requirements with a fully tested and validated design guide.
Look for a copy of the validated design and blueprint to follow VMWorld later this year. Read about some customer deployments in an ESG Whitepaper. Check out some exciting announcements around what Riverbed and VMware are working on together around enabling the Branch Office Desktop. Also be sure to check out what VMware has in store for branch office deployments in Bill Bliss and Tommy Walker’s VMWorld session (EUC1360) on Wednesday Aug. 29th at 2:30pm.
