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Virtualisation from the horse-owner's mouth

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Deepa
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ANAHEIM, USA: On one hand, there are cost savings, IT consolidation, conducive climate for a work-from-home contingent and the hard-to-ignore wave of BYOD sweeping by. On the other hand, there is the question of native applications, non-negotiable user experience, control imperative, regulatory pressures, data integrity and privacy issues. Virtualisation and its scions of solutions are indeed at a cusp of sorts.

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The experiences have been diverse but progressive and the journey, with its share of bumps, sounds adventurous enough. Specially, when you hear it from someone who does not sell it but the one who is at the other side of the table, consuming it.

At a panel of customers at Citrix Synergy 2013, a diverse huddle of customers exchanged and narrated some interesting experiences with their IT embrace to a new age of solutions, specially with the onset of forces like BYOD and consumerisation of IT.

Alan Pawlak, head of client services, Aetna highlights how using the Citrix breed of solutions has helped him address a work-from-home contingent and allow work-life flexibility with all the control one can desire. Duane Schau, director of University Information Technology Services, Indiana University finds the same portfolio helping him out deliver 3000 fixed assets at labs to about 72,000 students who are increasingly demanding mobile-flexibility.

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"Do we need to have computer labs when students are bringing their own devices? Why not redirect those dollars that are going into maintaining these labs? Virtualistaion allows us to do that and what helps really is the part of segmentation, wherein we can allocate and decide as per user profiles. We deploy this but we allow diversity of devices and see if it's a thin client, tablet or any other computer." he argues.

There is also a healthcare CIO juxtaposed right there who feels the technology of this genre a blessing in times of drastic Budget cuts happening in the industry.

While people may feel that mobility is not something of a hotspot trend at a hospital, ironically, employees who stay inside always also need to have flexible ways to operate since most of them have their desks by a patient's bedside all the time.

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"Add to that financial implications of losing a device, and that makes the solutions all the more attractive." Mark Farrow, CIO and Assistant VP, Information and Communication Technologies, Hamilton Health Sciences recounts.

To an industry that is often vulnerable to prices of gold, it probably helps to take advantage of cost-controls that come as an advantage, as David Collier, Global Senior Citrix Engineer, Newmont Mining Corporation shares.

Parked in almost a same universe is a CIO from India too, who was a tough contender at the Synergy Innovation Awards this year.

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N Jayantha Prabhu, CTO, Essar Group starts by outlining Essar as an organisation to first publish a BYOD policy two years back. For him it's not so much about catching up on trends but about keeping his business agile. A business that has grown exponentially in last few years and fuelled by acquisitions also finds its executives travelling a lot. The CIO has for instance, ensured tools like the one for BlackBerry phones for its executives travelling abroad so that they can be hooked in to an internal social media app without any problems.

But there should be a flip side to all the promise and excitement around virtualisation and the solutions flanking it.

There are some challenges or hopes as these CIOs view it.

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Compliance for healthcare may mandate tight data integrity and control but on the other track, it also translates into issues around duplication, over-provisioning and back-up related areas. Can a good virtusliation solution or BYOD add-on handle that well?

Farow takes that doubt into stride as he commented on a CIOL query here.

As he explains, with focus on centralising data, managing source spots of information, allowing access smoothly, taking care of big data and concepts of repositories; this part can be sorted out.

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"We have a mix of Citrix solutions with real-time portals and that helps. We are also planning to bring in ShareFile vigorously and that should be a great approach to addressing this piece. We are not yet comfortable with public cloud offerings though." he avers.

For Scott Wright, Enterprise Architect, Marathon Oil Corporation, it is not so much about devices but about user experience when it comes to his concerns. "Users do not feel like giving up something and the tool has to maintain their incumbent experience. Citrix has done a great job at UI that way."

He hopes that now the company will accelerate on making everything tightly integrated and seamless from XenDesktop to other Citrix pieces etc. "Hope they can keep the R&D going and the tight integration part improves ahead."

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If employees at Prabhu's organisation, ask questions about the company's social media policy during interviews, he is not surprised and uncomfotable as he knows that for a workforce where average age is around 28 years, he can not ignore BYOD forces.

Yet, ensuring that users do not suffer from alienation either ways, whether it is being denied a specific device or being unable to find same icons and interface as their own device had; can be a moot point.

The problem compounds when it is hard to gaze the technology crystal ball and be ready for any form factor or device-craze, be it BlackBerry or tablets or Apple devices.

Farrow confesses that it is not easy to look at the ball with certainity and that's why one does not put all eggs in one basket.

Controlling country-specific connectivity issues or security snags or IP pieces has also to be considered while betting big on the BYOD or virtualised bandwagon, as it turns out after absorbing these diverse customer experiences.

In short, it's a good track, but like any good horse will tell, the part about blinkers matters.

smac