TechPulse 360

At a media roundtable on virtualisation, enterprise customers expressed skepticism on the benefits of desktop virtualisation

Desktop virtualisation is not catching up to the hype yet as enterprise customers are just not seeing as much benefits to it than server virtualisation or even cloud computing.

For Dell’s Enterprise division CTO Paul Prince that I met today at a roundtable on virtualisation, along with VMware CTO Steve Herrod and some enterprise customers, the management of virtualisation is the hot topic du jour for enterprise IT users.

Follows a video excerpt of my conversation with Prince on:

• His role as CTO for Dell’s enterprise division, which includes also overseeing CPU technologies for the entire company. Not surprising as Prince was an executive at Intel prior to joining Dell;
• The need to manage virtual resources including storage, networking, high-availability…;
• Dell Consulting’s role in advising IT customers. “Our competitors are all about helping customers think their problem is so big they need the help to solve it, in our case we tend to focus more on helping our customers to understand that made no be as complicated as they thought. Help them to get over the hump and start doing it;”
• Desktop virtualisation and why enterprises are not seeing yet the benefit in deploying it. “It’s clearly a learning curve for customers to get to understand the benefit of desktop virtualisation and start deploying it;”
• The need to plan carefully before deploying virtual machines to avoid VM sprawl;
• How enterprises can save 50% to 2 to 3 times by deploying virtualisation;
• The issue of software licensing and how choosing a more expensive but more flexible version (like Windows Data Center edition) can help enterprises save money in their deployment of virtualisation;
• And finally on Dell’s own IT department, a VMware “shop.”