Critical.
Authoritative.
Strategic.
Subscribe to CIO Magazine »

Virtualised desktops gain Aussie traction

Largest virtual desktop customer in Australia in the federal public sector with about 3700 seats

Virtualisation giant VMWare has put together a specialist crack team to tackle the opportunity of converting legacy “fat client” PC desktops in Australian organisations to slimline virtualised environments, as more virtual desktop rollouts continue to emerge around the country.

In late June the City of Cockburn revealed it was one of the first — potentially the first — organizations in Australia to undertake a roll-out of virtualised desktops across its entire operations — shifting some 200 desktop PCs to VMWare’s View solution (version 4.0).

In tendering documentation released over the past several weeks, the City of Norwood, Payneham and St Peters in South Australia revealed it had also standardized on VMWare View.

“The council’s server environment is virtualised with VMWare vSphere 4 and the desktop environment is virtualized with VMWare View 4,” the council stated in tender documents as it went to market for new desktop thin clients, personal computers and other hardware in areas such as storage area networks. The council has 84 workstations in its head office and other machines scattered around branch offices.

“It’s going particularly well for us,” said the virtualisation giant’s local chief Paul Harapin (pictured) today of the virtual desktop opportunity. “We’re really starting to see an uptake.” VMWare’s new desktop team has sales staff as well as those working in technical and professional services to aid customers with their desktop shift.

The executive said VMWare’ largest virtual desktop customer in Australia was in the federal public sector with about 3700 seats — although he couldn’t say which department it was.

The Department of Defence has long been examining the case for taking many of its desktops into thin client territory, with chief information officer Greg Farr having lamented the fact that many staff have several desktop PCs on their desks due to the need to maintain separate networks for different classification levels of data.

Harapin said as well as public sector take-up, VMWare was also seeing adoption by banks, and there was still a lot of use of the technology in call centres and overseas development houses where organisations wanted to deliver desktop services but keep the data stored in Australia.

In addition, he said he was seeing adoption in organisations with between 200 and 1000 seats – with local councils being a good example.

However, the VMWare chief said the desktop section was just one piece of the puzzle — customers were also virtualising older applications, with the shift to modern operating systems like Windows 7 often leaving legacy software behind. And the bigger picture was even broader – customers wanted to be able to access company services on any device.

“Whether there’ll be lots of desktops around in the next few years is debatable, what there will be is people with lots of devices — iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry,” said Harapin. “I don’t travel now with my laptop, whereas I used to. Now I just take my iPad.”

“Frankly I can do almost everything I want to do off the iPad. And that’s what more and more companies are looking at — how do we deliver services to the user, regardless of what device they have.”

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the CIO comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Coverage
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Tags: virtual desktops, virtualisation, VMware, VMware vSphere
Latest Blog Posts
Whitepapers
  • HP Imaging and Printing Services
    According to Gartner, a major focus for organisations today and in the foreseeable future is shifting from cost reduction to growth, expansion, innovation, and operational excellence. If your organization is serious about driving growth and innovation and improving customer experiences, you’ll find that a well-managed imaging and printing environment is key to these goals. A growing number of organizations are turning to services as a means of integrating imaging and printing into their overall IT infrastructure strategies. It may be one of the fastest ways to continue to drive down costs, fund innovation, and prepare your organisation to capitalise on future opportunities. Read more.
    Learn more »
  • Enhancing Decision-Making, Cost-Efficiency, and Profitability With Predictive Analytics
    Today’s managers must always look at the past, present, and future. They need reports on past performance to improve operational efficiency. Business intelligence (BI) platforms such as Information Builders WebFOCUS, are providing a unified decision-support environment where managers can retrieve and analyze data about past, present, and future activities. In this paper, we will discuss the incorporation of predictive modeling capabilities into the WebFOCUS BI platform, and highlight how this advanced functionality can dramatically improve decision-making, thus reducing risk and costs while increasing revenue and profits.
    Learn more »
  • Seven Steps to Effective Data Governance
    Creating a framework to ensure the confidentiality, quality, and integrity of data – the core meaning of data governance – is essential to meet both internal and external requirements, such as financial reporting, regulatory compliance, and privacy policies. At its best, data governance roots out risk – both business and compliance risk – by increasing oversight. This white paper provides seven steps for taking such an approach, concluding with a real world example, taking an incremental approach using a repeatable framework that is a practical, proven strategy that any size organization can implement to suit their immediate and long-term needs and budget.
    Learn more »
All whitepapers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis.
Recent comments