Michael Dolan Dot Com

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

IBM takes on Desktop cost challenges (with Linux)

Interesting news out of my employer today. Here’s the thing, everyone who hears “Linux desktop” has a knee-jerk reaction and thinks of all the things they do on their own PC, laptop, Mac. The reality is you’re probably not the target market for virtual desktops. The market is large desktop environments that have thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of users and who are not doing consumer-oriented work (or shouldn’t be). The cost savings of moving from physical PCs in a 1 user to 1 PC model to a managed model with virtual terminals can be significant. We’ll see where the market goes for this model, but I know of a few very large companies that want to make this model very real. The economic situation and the impact on IT budgets may act as an accelerant.

Oh, I forgot to mention that the IBM solution runs on Ubuntu and can be easily deployed on RHEL/SLED too ;-)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/12/04/ibm_linux_lotus_virtual_desktop/

IBM is working with Virtual Bridges and its VERDE (Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment) product to ship a virtual Canonical Ubuntu Linux desktop, with Lotus email, word processing, spreadsheets, unified communication, and social networking software included, to a variety of end-point devices. Virtual printing is also included.

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When we look back several years from now, I think we’ll see this time as an inflection point when the economic climate pushed the virtual Linux desktop from theory to practice. The financial pressures on organizations are staggering; the management of PCs is unwieldy, and traditional office software innovation is paltry. Today’s virtual desktop is delivering superior collaborative software, an innovative delivery method, and an open-source operating system that is demanding clients’ consideration.