I have a long history in the remote desktop and remote application market, so for obvious reasons I like the notion of virtual desktops.  But when creating slideware for a series of one-day TechTarget seminars on VDI I started thinking about the “reality” of VDI.  A couple of VDI facts I collected are confusing but also interesting when looking at them side-by-side.  Both Citrix and VMware claim that they are the market leader and currently have a VDI user base of roughly 1.5 million each – in a market of 600 million desktops in total.  This means that VDI has a 1% market share at most, but only if all VDI licenses delivered by all VDI vendors are used in production.  That’s not too impressive, but okay, it’s an emerging market. Even if it was 5%, traditional desktops would still be dominating the market. And this is exactly what I hear when talking to customers: VDI is still a niche. Migrating their physical PCs to Windows 7 is far more important for most customers.

On the other side, in some of their public slide decks Microsoft states that VDI will reach a market share of more than 30% in 2010 and 60% in 2012 according to Gartner, IDC and Microsoft internal projections.  Okay, if this comes true, the next years will be extremely successful for ALL VDI vendors, such as Microsoft, Citrix, VMware, Quest, Red Hat, Oracle, Ericom, Propalms, Virtual Bridges, MokaFive, PanoLogic, NComputing, Kaviza, Leostream and Synchron.  Assuming that none of the big vendors and market analysts is lying, the reality may be that VDI is used in parallel to traditional desktops, adding to the total number of existing desktops rather than just replacing them.  It may still get tough for some of the smaller vendors as Gartner’s virtualization hype cycle published in July 2010 shows that hosted virtual desktops are on their way down from the peak of inflated expectations to the trough of disillusionment.  But there’s light at the end of the tunnel as Gartner also predicts that it will take hosted virtual desktops less than two years to mainstream adoption.  This means high risks for small vendors, but big opportunities for investors.

Here’s another VDI thing:  In their commercials and banner ads, Citrix claims that their products are all about simplicity.  What?  Citrix is either ignoring the facts or has some interesting interpretation of the word simplicity.  Today’s VDI solutions are all about solving provisioning, brokerage, networking, storage, scalability, user experience and personalization issues.  Without any doubt these are all very complex things, which not only influence VDI environments based on Citrix products.  VMware and Microsoft are not better here.  Installing a production-ready VMware VDI environment is also far from being easy, no matter how experienced you are.  Ever tried to setup a Microsoft-only VDI environment with all the different server roles and role services?  If you did you know what I’m talking about.  That ain’t simple!  It takes me a full day to introduce the core VDI principles, products and challenges to seasoned IT professionals – and I can only scratch the surface.  I interpret simplicity as something similar to the iPad user interface (even though I don’t like Apple stuff too much, but that’s another story).  Everything that takes longer than ten or twenty minutes to introduce and everything that requires an expert to make it work is not simple.  Telling an IT professional or his boss that introducing and maintaining VDI is simple just sucks, it’s misleading.  Citrix, can you hear me?

But wait a minute.  Maybe Citrix was looking at VDI from a user’s perspective.  Provided that a troop of house-elves installed and perfectly configured a full-blown Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop environment (including some add-on products), things may indeed look simple for a user.  He or she can use any endpoint device and get intuitive access to any application – independent if installed locally or remotely – while enjoying superior performance and full personalization.  The nature of the endpoint device doesn’t matter; Windows is only the mandatory backend runtime environment required for a subset of the applications requested by the users.  The endpoint device can be whatever the user prefers to use.  If this is what Citrix had in mind when creating their marketing campaign around simplicity, I’m all in.  If only it was not so hard to find good house-elves and get the endless budget approved.

But it gets worse.  In two weeks I will be speaking at BASTA, a major developer conference in Europe.  I’m on the Azure track, talking about “Windows applications in the cloud” (Tue, Sept 21, 5:15pm).  My goal is to educate developers about the impacts it has when running their Windows applications from one of the major VDI and remoting platforms.  I’m really looking forward to meet with the Microsoft developer community.  But when browsing the agenda and seeing what other speakers have to share with the audience I get the feeling that I come from a different planet.  They are talking about Software as a Service, SOA and Silverlight while Microsoft confirms their confidence that this will be the future.  Wait a minute, that’s the same Microsoft saying that VDI will be the dominating desktop delivery model of the future.  I mean, let’s face it, as of today Azure doesn’t even have an IaaS offering.  The Azure platform cannot host virtual desktops you can connect to through RDP from the outside, even though Prashant Ketkar, marketing director for Azure, promised such functionality in February.  If it was really important to Microsoft, they would be offering this service by now.  Is Microsoft cheating on us VDI guys?  Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but Microsoft seems to have multiple agendas.

So, in a nutshell, it looks like all major vendors and market analysts are walking in the dark.  The Citrix versus VMware fights may become obsolete in less than two years when Silverlight finally dominates the market and Windows is just an application hosting platform within Azure - just kidding, but I scared you for a moment, didn’t I!  But there’s still some truth in my statement.  What if the Microsoft developers are right?  What if they are about to start creating the next-generation applications that don’t require a Windows desktop anymore?  Did you ever see how smooth Silverlight applications run on a Mac?  Is it possible that in five or ten years we will be looking back at virtual desktops with a smile of wisdom and knowing that they were only good for a transition phase?  On the other side, who knows what IT users will be asking for in some years?  Maybe the next-generation VDI will be based on an über-cool Windows 8 or 9 desktop that rocks the world by then.  Just keep that in mind when listening to all the VDI marketing at VMworld, Synergy and Tech-Ed.

At the beginning of this year I got into touch with some folks from SearchDatacenter.de, a website provided by TechTarget.  They asked me if I wanted to deliver a vendor-independent one-day seminar diving into the technical details of virtual desktops.  After thinking a second or two I said “Yes, sure”.  The reason for such an immediate positive response was that I had the pleasure to get my hands dirty with different VDI solutions during the previous weeks and months.  Now this seminar gives me the opportunity to share my experience with other experts.  If you want to sign up for the seminar, here is the link: http://de.amiando.com/seminar-virtualisierung-von-windows-desktops.html (in German).

I don’t have any VDI vendor preference as long as the underlying product is about providing Windows desktops – as a side note I have to admit that the times when I had some first-hand expertise with UNIX or Linux are long gone.  The products and services that I’m currently working on for making a living are designed to be compatible to any Windows desktop delivery mechanism.  This makes me an unbiased Windows desktop guy, but with a long history in the remote desktop market.  And let’s face it, in many aspects a virtual Windows desktop is only a new flavor of the good old remote desktop Kool-Aid.  So with the knowledge of the latest VDI products and a solid background in what used to be server-based computing I would regard myself as a “seasoned” VDI expert – LOL.  I love VDI from a technology perspective even though I’m not sure yet if it will rock the world at a commercial level.

The outline of my VDI seminar is straight forward. Here is what I will do – but remember, the initial seminar series will be in German language:

1. Briefly introduce the basic concepts of virtualization and the typical target audience for the different virtualization types.  All this brings us to a common understanding of what desktop virtualization really is, why we want to deal with it and who it may be good for.
2. Describe – and sometimes demo – the end-to-end VDI solutions offered by Microsoft, Citrix, VMware, Quest and other vendors.  This will be fun stuff for tekkies.  It’s particularly interesting to see how far you can get with Microsoft products and components only.
3. Use demos, pre-recorded performance videos and some nasty charts to compare the VDI solutions when using them in selected real-life scenarios.  Before you ask: Yes, user expectations, network requirements, storage concepts, licensing models, thin client aspects and cost calculations are included.
4. Scare attendees by highlighting the major challenges encountered with VDI and try to make them relax again by suggesting solutions.  Sneak preview: Unfortunately, not all VDI challenges have simple solutions yet.
5. Predict the future as good as possible by envisioning upcoming VDI improvements and looking at alternatives, such as client hypervisors.

The seminar is scheduled for September at four different locations in Germany.  SearchDatacenter.de started promoting the event and since then I’m hearing a constant rattle and hum in some German social networks.  Seriously, I didn’t expect so much noise.  Typically Germans are, um, a little bit conservative when dealing with new IT concepts.  And I know what I’m talking about; I was born, raised and educated in Germany even though I’m working for a Dutch company now.

German IT managers tend to ask questions like “Is it mature enough?”, “Is it secure?”, “Does it save money?”, “Does it give me full control?”, “Does it really fit into our company structure?”, “Does it add or does it remove complexity?” when a new IT concept is involved.  Don’t get me wrong, these are valid questions and the answers will most certainly help making solid decisions.  It’s against German IT habits to introduce a new technology just because it’s cool – which makes German IT well organized and predictable but boring sometimes.  And now I’m learning that many German organizations already started their VDI projects or that they are seriously planning to get started in the near future.  That’s awesome!  I mean, this tells me that either German IT habits changed overnight or that VDI is on a good way to become a commonly accepted standard.

However, there is one important question that I’m not able to answer yet: Will virtual desktops replace the majority of traditional physical desktops?  When talking to VMware or thin client vendors the answer is clear.  But when talking to Microsoft the message is somewhat different.  Microsoft says that even though virtual desktops are potentially good for all organization this concept may not work for all user groups.  In other words: The future is still wide open.  But does this mean that VDI may just turn out to become a tactical solution selected by IT professionals when trying to solve a particular problem?  Maybe or maybe not.

But there’s one thing that is for sure: When introducing a virtual desktop infrastructure it’s all about making the right technical decisions, because it’s first the users and then the IT administrators that matter.  And this is exactly the perspective from which I will be looking at VDI in my seminar.

At BriForum in Chicago two weeks ago, Shawn Bass and I presented a session comparing today’s most popular remoting protocols Microsoft RDP, Citrix ICA/HDX, Quest EOP and VMware/Teradici PCoIP. We figured that it doesn’t help attendees if we introduce an artificial performance index representing each protocol’s quality. Instead we created a large number of 30-second video clips recorded from the VGA output of a client device while using different graphics and multimedia formats in combination with each of the four remoting protocols. In our session we showed the four videos associated with each particular format side-by-side, giving the audience the opportunity to judge the visible results by themselves.

Even though we created a collection of roughly 100 videos, all four vendors and some attendees came to us after the session, saying that we missed some important scenarios. It became more than obvious that trying to cover all relevant scenarios is a multi-dimensional challenge:

1. Protocols: RDP, ICA/HDX, EOP and PCoIP (more to come, like RemoteFX)
2. Formats: GDI, GDI+, PDF, Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight, Flash, WMV, Quicktime, DirectX (D3D) and OpenGL (some with multiple versions)
3. Network: LAN or WAN with different settings for bandwidth, latency and packet loss
4. Client: Windows XP and Windows 7 running on physical hardware or running in a virtual environment

Only the combination of ALL options would provide the full picture. Isn’t it funny? A session that originally was intended to provide some background information about graphics and multimedia formats turns out to become the quest for the holy grail of remoting protocols. Now Shawn and I are working on how to create new raw videos without too much installation and configuration overhead and on how to present the results in an way that is easy to digest.

I found out for myself that I cannot deal with comparing more than four video streams running side-by-side. My brain capacity seems to be limited to four simultaneous graphical input signals - probably I only have a brain with four bio CPU cores (or would that be a brain GPU?). Maybe we need to find some smart kids that were born with more brain cores and grew up with watching six or eight videos at the same time, helping us to identify the best remoting protocol

Last week I attended the Norwegian Citrix User Group Spring Event in Lillestrom (which is close to Oslo). There were roughly 100 attendees and this crowd is really inspiring. Despite the fact that they were never cheering and screeming while I was presenting my sessions, I had some really good conversations with individual memers of this group. In addition, we had some round table discussions which made me think about our industry.

One question I was asked was “What do you think was among the most influencial technologies developed over the last years?”. My answer was touch screens and gesture-oriented computer interaction. I truely believe that these technologies will massively influence the way how people interact with computers. This doesn’t mean that they will replace keyboard and mouse in all use cases. However, touching a screen and using gestures is a lot more intuitive for many users, so they will be adopted rapidly. Unfortunately, most existing applications cannot really profit from a touch screen yet. I expect many application designers and developers to come up with new solutions for that, revelutionizing “natural” user interaction within the next five years.

What does that mean for virtual desktops and and remote applications? There are so many existing Windows applications - in particular in enterprise environments - that will not disappear shortly. I believe that Windows will slowly turn into an application hosting platform providing such Windows applications for dedicated touch and gesture-oriented frontends. These frontend devices will go beyond the iPad form factor as we it know it today. The application runtime logic including the graphical UI will be clearly separated from the device used for user interaction. As a consequence the difference between web applications and traditional Windows applications will disappear step by step. This will not only be the case at work but also at home. In other words, desktop virtualization and application remoting will be a commodity. Microsoft and Citrix (and to some extend VMware and other vendors) will provide the necessary base technology regarding application runtime platform and remoting protocol. Multiple vendors will provide the forntend devices, satisfying the requirements of a heterogeneous target audience. Do you agree? What are your thoughts?

Isn’t it funny, I didn’t even mention the hype phrase “cloud”, as cloud is only one scenario among so many that can benefit from mature desktop and application remoting technologies.

It’s a typical spring with many conferences both in the US and in Europe. In about a week I will be on my way to Citrix Synergy in San Francisco where Shawn Bass and I are invited to deliver two technical sessions. For details check out my blog article from January. But there is more. In May there is Citrix Geek Speak Live! in Zurich (Switzerland), CUGTech in Olso (Norway) and a joined expert training class with Shawn Bass in Malmo (Sweden) on my list. Only recently I was accepted to be speaking at Microsoft TechEd in New Orleans (June 7 - 10) and at BriForum in Chicago (June 15 - 17). Lots of great events and I feel honored to get the opportunity to contribute.

Here are the abstracts of my TechEd and BriForum  sessions:

TechEd Session VIR316, Wednesday, June 9, 3:15 PM - 4:30 PM - Remote Desktop Session Host versus Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Smackdown: With Windows Server 2008 R2 the traditional session virtualization scenario delivered through Remote Desktop Services (formerly Terminal Services) is expanding its role to provide an extensible platform for a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). VDI enables Windows 7 desktop environments to run within centralized Hyper-V servers. But which of the two is the solution of choice? In this session, Benny Tritsch, Remote Desktop Services MVP, introduces you to the two options, highlighting pros and cons in an unbiased manner. With real-world examples and demonstrations he gives you expert guidance on when to use what.

BriForum Session (with Shawn Bass) - Remoting Protocols Turned Inside Out: RDP, ICA, HDX, PCoIP and EOP represent a selection of popular remoting protocols. But how are they different from each other and what does this mean for the users? What are the best methods when remoting standard graphics and multimedia output formats? Join presentation virtualization geek Shawn Bass and computer graphics expert Benny Tritsch in an in-depth look at how graphics and media remoting really works.

BriForum Session (with Kevin Goodman and Shawn Bass) - Profile Streaming versus Profile Segmentation: Kevin Goodman will represent profile streaming and Benny Tritsch will represent profile segmentation. Both will passionately debate the pros and cons of the two profile management concepts. Shawn Bass is the brave neutral moderator, preventing the two others attacking each other from a profile brawl.

Since almost two weeks, Shawn Bass and I teach Advanced Citrix Training Classes and present at Geek Speak Events in Norway and France. We had an audience of almost 30 training class students and 60+ event attendees. We always asked about the experience with virtual desktop infrastructures in production environments. The amazing outcome was that there was literally none. Sure, there are a number of proof-of-concept environments, but no real production environment with VDI - at least when talking to our peers in Norway and France. Only Shawn knows a US customer with several thousand users working on virtual desktops. But these desktops are dedicated desktops with private images on an expensive storage system.

I was never a fan of pure VDI. And again I’m asking myself if there is a real market for pure VDI? Or is it only a “virtual” market? According to articles published by several VDI experts and marketing material coming from serious software vendors, VDI seems to be the only future for them. But if this VDI market really exists somewhere, it better materializes fast, or investors may pull out there money and invest it into new stuff. And the media may fall in love with the next buzz word.

Another question I’m asking myself is what will happen to all the VDI POCs if this market never really takes off as expected? Will there be technical experts for de-virtualizing virtual desktops and anti-virtualization ghost writers cleaning up enterprise strategies by removing all references to VDI? This all may happen when people find out about some limitations with VDI that cannot be removed on short term, such as properly integrating TV overlay cards, video cameras, DVD burners, external harddisks, music players, modern cell phones or pen devices.

The virtualization war has just begun. Betting all your money on only a weapon called VDI seems not to be a smart move. So I would agree with Microsoft that VDI is good for all enterprises but not for all desktops. In particular for the users it’s the right technology mixture combined with usability that matters, not a vendor-driven one-for-all philosophy. The feedback I received from experts and peers over the last days and weeks reconfirms this statement and indicates that the world of desktops is not VDI flat. The surprising fact is that many virtualization expert out there seem to have silently accepted this already. Now they are waiting for the moment the “pure VDI flu” is over and they can go back to work and implement the full spectrum of virtualization technologies as needed.

When I attended the MVP Summit at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond last week, there was this moment when a simple truth struck me: Microsoft is sooooo different from VMware and Citrix and Apple.  Well, you may say that this doesn’t come as a big surprise.  Most probably you are right, but this time it’s for a different reason.  It happened when an MVP’s question to one of the Microsoft Windows product groups top managers was “Where do Windows workstation and Windows server product lines meet when decisions about the general virtualization strategy are made?” and the answer was “At Steve Balmer”! What? Are you serious?

Even if this answer may not be 100% accurate, it gave me some valuable insight into how Microsoft sees the IT universe, a simple fact that was confirmed again and again during a number of conversations I had with Microsoft folks over the last week.  It looks like Microsoft does not intend to convince “the market” – customers, partners, IT professionals, consultants and system integrators – of a specific virtualization strategy.  It looks like Microsoft avoids predicting a single virtualization scenario which they believe will be the one and only future option.  There is not this one truth spread by Microsoft evangelists.  Instead, Microsoft simply tries to have enough products on stock for all potential virtualization scenarios!

What does that mean?  Microsoft is always working on many new products, some of them brand new, some of them in stealth mode and others just new version of existing products.  All these Microsoft development activities follow a common design pattern, demanding that all resulting products must have the potential to be good for the masses.  I mean in the range of several 100 million units.  This doesn’t imply that all products will really become successful enough to sell at big scale.  But each of them could be a 100 million seller, if the market decided to go into a specific direction.  And if not, Microsoft just dumps a product that didn’t make it after a while, or gives it another try with a different developer team, waiting for a second chance.  Dumping a product doesn’t mean that it was technically bad; it just means that it was not accepted by the masses or that the timing was not good.  There are quite some Microsoft products I would not regard as technically superior, but have a big market share and thus are successful according to Microsoft’s definition of success.  It seems like Microsoft’s overall mission is “good enough beats great” when done at the right time and at the right prize, in particular when looking at the virtualization market.

This brings me to VMware.  Their strategy is convincing the market that virtual desktops are the future, now that their initial mission of virtualizing servers is almost complete.  In the VMware universe, there is no other valid future scenario, only virtual desktops, nothing else, no matter what.  And they are convinced that this scenario requires the best-of-breed products which VMware claims to provide.  If VMware was in the building and construction industry, offering sophisticated bathrooms and kitchens, they would say that it’s enough to have a bathroom and kitchen to live in.  In a way they are right.  As a matter of fact, you can happily live in an apartment that only has a nice bathroom and a big enough kitchen with a bed – an apartment I rented when I was at university was pretty much that way.

But there are situations when you want a living room, extra sleeping rooms, a basement, an attic or a patio.  Probably you don’t need them all at the same time or you need them in different combinations at different occasions.  But you want to have the freedom of choice, despite the fact that not all of these rooms can be of superior quality right from the beginning.  In the virtualization market, it’s pretty much the same.  We have server virtualization, session hosting (aka presentation virtualization or terminal services), desktop virtualization, client hypervisors, application virtualization, storage virtualization, cloud computing and more.  It’s Microsoft’s clear ambition to have good enough solutions for all of them – or have a trusted partner ecosystem to fill the gaps.  This is where Citrix comes into the game, and Quest, and Symantec, and many others – but not necessarily VMware with their one-size-fits-all vision of virtual desktop for everybody.  The Microsoft universe is so different from the VMware universe.

Unfortunately, Citrix seems to be impressed by VMware’s strategy on one side and by Apple’s success in the consumer market on the other side.  When translating this into the apartment story again, Apple wants to convince us all to live in a really cool trailer, just because it’s mobile and it’s all you need to be trendy.  This all inspires Citrix to concentrate on building trailers for business people – including big bathrooms – instead of continuing building great living rooms and sleeping rooms and patios for Microsoft houses.  Come on Citrix, give me a break.  I know you can do better than this.  Tell your customers that you have a spectrum of products that goes far beyond trailers.

All that being said, what are the implications?  I get the impression that Microsoft does not have that one solid vision of what the virtualization technology of the future will be.  And to be honest, they just don’t need to.  With all the money and developers they have, they can afford building good enough products for all possible virtualization scenarios and ship them right after they see that the mass market is ready for them – plus provide some early teasers to probe the market.  They were always extremely successful being a second mover, letting others – like VMware and Apple – find out what the real market trends are.  As soon as a market trend is confirmed to generate substantial revenue, Microsoft can use their marketing power to deliver the right products.  The trick is not to lose touch with the successful market seekers and keep on developing all sorts of solutions with the hope that some of them will become relevant in the future.  Not the fastest and not the most elegant method, but very successful so far.

Now, what about Citrix?  My personal opinion is that if Citrix was smart, they would just use the spectrum of the outstanding products they already own and continue to use them to convert good enough Microsoft products into great solutions for specific market segments.  I don’t believe that copying central aspects of Apple’s or VMware’s marketing strategy is beneficial for Citrix and their customers.  The IT universe has more to offer than just virtual desktops.

Citrix has finalized the program agenda for Synergy San Francisco on May 12 – 14, 2010.  Yesterday they confirmed that they have scheduled Shawn Bass and me for the breakout session “Mastering User Profiles in Virtual Desktop Environments”.  Session date-time/location is Thursday, May 13, 11:30 a.m.  – 12:20 p.m. in Moscone West Convention Center - Moscone 2016-2018.

Here is the session description: When looking at user profiles, it’s about each user’s individual digital personality.  As an IT professional, you better try not to reduce workspace flexibility, or your users will make your working life harder every day.  When you only needed to deal with one desktop and one profile per user, things were relatively simple.  But now, with remote desktops and applications delivered through a range of virtualization technologies, we are facing a very different situation.  CTPs Benny Tritsch and Shawn Bass present an all-up view of the different user profile scenarios in multiple virtualization setups.

In addition to our breakout session, Shawn and I will also be speaking at Citrix Synergy Geek Speak Live!  Our session will be about “How Graphics and Media Remoting Really Works”.  Here is the description: It’s an urban legend that Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) shipped with Terminal Services has design shortcomings and scalability limits.  Many IT professionals heard more than once that the Citrix ICA protocol is superior.  Is that true?  Are there ways to improve graphics remoting performance for common user scenarios?  And what are Microsoft and Citrix doing to improve graphics remoting with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2?  How good are RDP and ICA in dealing with GDI, GDI+, DirectX, OpenGL, Windows Presentation Foundation, Flash, Silverlight, videos and animations?  Join virtualization experts Benny Tritsch and Shawn Bass in an in-depth look at how desktop, application and media remoting works.  After attending his session, you will have no excuse for not knowing what RDP and ICA are good for.

Hope to see many of you in San Francisco.

I’m planning to attend the upcoming annual Microsoft MVP Summit next February.  Like every year since I was announced a Terminal Server MVP in 2003, I’m really looking forward to meet with members of the Microsoft product groups and directly learn from those people who are responsible for the individual product features.  When talking to the Remote Desktop Services product group – formerly known as the Terminal Services product group – I would like to cover the following topics with them:

• PowerShell scripting – How far can I get with PowerShell when managing RDS/RDV environments
• Public RDS API – New functionalities exposed through the “TS” API and .NET classes
• Profile management in WS2003 TS and WS2008R2 RDS side-by-side scenarios
• How to manage Microsoft RDS/RDV in large enterprises – how SCCM or other system management products can help us and our customers
• RDP7 protocol details – compression (bulk and media-specific) and client-side versus server-side rendering details
• Remote Desktop Connection – What will be the next steps with the RDP client? Will there be a combined RDP/App-V client? Central management
• Calista – estimated release date and technical details, e.g. support of graphics mechanisms (2D, 3D, Flash, Silverlight, WPF) and remoting architectures (RDS, virtual desktops on Hyper-V, hardware acceleration)
• What do RDS and cloud computing have in common from the Microsoft RDS product group’s perspective

But wait a minute.  When I was thinking about all these topics, I also started asking myself a critical question: Will Remote Desktop Services and Remote Desktop Virtualization Hosts still be relevant in three or five year from now?  I mean, if Windows applications as we know them today (Windows Forms based on managed and unmanaged code) will be replaced by other application types, there may be no need for RDS and RDV.  Applications based on Adobe Flash/Air or Microsoft Silverlight may just not require that sort of remoting mechanisms as provided with RDS.

Over the last weeks, I’ve been talking to several infrastructure and development experts about this topic, asking them for their opinions.  It was interesting to find out that none of them – except for those primarily dealing with cloud datacenter infrastructure – believe that conventional Windows applications will disappear during the next five years.  After all these conversations my personal prediction is that in five years we will see less than 50% new style applications (using Flash/Air, Silverlight or something similar), while more than half of all applications installed on corporate IT platforms will still be conventional Windows Forms applications.  I strongly believe that changes in the application landscape will not be happening too fast if there is such a huge base of established applications that were developed in the conventional way.  In addition to that, there are still many developers out there who stick to “old school” programming when developing new Windows applications.  This clearly leaves enough room for remoting technologies over the next years.

That being said, I still believe that Remote Desktop Services and the RDP protocol have a great future – even more than ever before, now that desktop and presentation virtualization has become a commonly accepted mainstream.  In such a scenario Windows Server 2008 R2 RDS and Windows 7 running as virtual desktop on Hyper-V are major milestones, strongly influencing corporate desktop strategies over the next years.  As a result, at the upcoming MVP Summit I’m clearly interested in finding out as much as I can about existing RDS/RDV details and new/updated components planned to be released in the near future.  To me this has way more relevance than talking about the long-term future of the Windows operating system.

Over the last years I had the opportunity to visit many corporate customers and have deep technical conversations with them, mostly around their existing or future terminal server, Citrix and virtualization infrastructures.  This allowed me to see many corporate IT environments from the inside and speak to the people responsible for planning and design – those mystic IT architects.  A good number of these IT architects were among the most brilliant and motivated individuals I ever got to know in my professional life.  But still, some of them were responsible for IT environments that – with all respect – just sucked.  At the beginning this was a big surprise to me as some of these corporate customers have great reputations for being well organized.  But after a while I figured that great businesses relying on not so good IT infrastructures are more the rule and not the exception.

Now the question is why there is such a big discrepancy between the relevant heads and the results when it comes to IT architecture.  After talking to other peers and expert in that matter I came to a simple conclusion: The issue is a combination of inadequate tools and management mindset.  This conclusion may simplify things a little bit too much, but for now see it as the starting point for a bigger discussion.  Why do I believe that tools and management mindset are the major reason that so many corporate IT architectures suck?

First let me start with the tools.  Are you aware what the most popular expert tools used by IT architects are?  It’s Powerpoint, Visio and flipcharts.  Seriously, would you let a traditional architect re-model or build your private apartment or your house if all he or she has is a Powerpoint slide deck and a couple of simple Visio drawings?  Most probably, you wouldn’t even trust a craftsman you asked to plan the installation of a new bathroom or kitchen if all he has is a hand-painted, rough plan on a piece of paper right before he wants to start working.  And this is a very wise decision as there are better planning tools for that, just go to any kitchen studio and you find out what I’m talking about.

Now compare the planning of many corporate IT environments with the planning in conventional architecture, in the automotive industry or in the aircraft industry.  What would such engineers and designers be without Autocad, Catia and the like?  Only IT design and planning seems to be done with the absence of IT when going beyond simple drawings.  Isn’t that weird?  There are no commonly established component libraries, there are no plausibility checks, there is no mandatory basic simulation method and there are no common criteria to approve a new IT infrastructure.  It all relies on the experience and the “common sense” of the IT architects in charge.  If you were to plan a bridge in the same way it wouldn’t be a big surprise if after your first bridge was built only half of the people or cars were able to make it to the other side.  And don’t tell me that IT infrastructures are too complex for computer-aided design and planning – just compare it to building new airplanes or cars where design and simulation tools are taken for granted.

Don’t get me wrong, most IT architects do the best they can – but quite often they are left alone with the planning.  This is a common situation even if so many enterprises have powerful products and tools to operate and constantly analyze all aspects of their existing IT infrastructure.  But most IT architects don’t have tools accepting the collected data as an input channel for their planning work.  Despite the lack of adequate tools, the expectation on the executive management side is that IT architects are able to provide necessary changes and updates in the IT infrastructure fast, reliable and cost effective – but without any substantial investment into their qualification and available resources.

This leads directly to the second issue; management mindset.  When sitting in meetings with customers, it is always interesting to note how long it takes some executives to make IT-related decisions and how fast they expect results from the IT staff, including IT architects.  In addition to that, there is a clear tendency that CIOs rather follow vendors’ marketing statements, hype topics and market waves instead of identifying and prioritizing the company’s real IT requirements.  Sometimes this is leading to an unhealthy influence of the executive management on an IT architect’s daily job.  Or – even worse – CTOs and CIOs don’t care at all about IT infrastructure planning processes even if it is of vital importance for running their core business.  Not to forget those executive who assign positions in IT architecture rather randomly, not always picking the right person for the job.  Another group of executives seems to believe that being an IT architect is only a part-time job, so they add this role to the job description of an IT administrator.  The same executive would never consider driving a company car that was designed by a motivated part-time car engineer having a day job at a gas station. (Well, on the other side, looking at today’s car industry, it may have been wise to let such down-to-earth part-time engineers make some design decisions regarding future cars – but that’s a different story.)

In a nutshell, many IT architects have neither the right tools nor the necessary management support.  All this comes down to the fact that great (part-time) IT architects don’t necessarily create good IT architectures, and nobody should blame them for that.  If companies started treating IT architecture in the same way as they are treating the management of their sales forces, offices buildings and company cars, many IT infrastructures would be in a much better shape – for the sake of an organization’s core business.  I’m dreaming of an “Autocad” for IT infrastructures and some mandatory approval regulations requiring reviews by independent external experts, just like for buildings, vehicles, roads, railroad tracks or power plants.  It’s all about risk management!

That being said, finding great IT architectures in some corporate environments is clear evidence that there are some brilliant IT architects out there.  I see them as outstanding individuals who are able to make things possible, against all odds and without adequate tools.  In most cases, such IT architects are backed up and fully empowered by their executive management.  But it’s so sad that this is the exception and not the rule.