April Seminar, Virtualisation In High-Tech Environments

101 Cambridge Science Park, Milton Rd

We are holding a free, invitation only seminar on the 23rd April 2012 for high-tech or research and development centric organisations in the Cambridge area.

Aimed at technical and business users with an interest in virtualisation, this is not a vendor-centric product briefing, but a sharing of real customer experiences in two demanding application areas and a detailed look at a world class software research and development facility. There will also be an opportunity to network with fellow members of the Cambridge technology cluster over lunch.

360is are hosting the event at Citrix’s R&D centre on the Cambridge Science Park. Two local case studies will feature, each from a different high-tech business that has adopted desktop or server virtualisation to increase productivity for specialist office workers, scientists, or engineers. If you are charged with supporting demanding, sophisticated users in the Cambridge area then this seminar will be of interest to you.

Contact the organiser for an invite if you would like to attend.

When: Monday April 23^rd 09:30 until 12:30

Where: Citrix Systems Inc, Building 101, Cambridge Science Park, Milton Road, Cambridge, CB4 0FY

Organiser: rob.gilson@360is.com

Summary Agenda:

09:30 Registration and Coffee

09:50 Start

10:00 Mark Heath VP of Products, Citrix XenServer

Detailed look at the engineering facilities and resources behind the Citrix R&D organisation

10:30 Case Study 1

Shortening the testing and development cycle for an large international software company

11:00 Break

11:15 Case Study 2

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) for demanding, scientific, and engineering users

11:45 Closing remarks and prize draw

12:00 Buffet lunch and open networking 

About 360is

360is have over 10 years’ experience in providing consultancy and professional services in the application of  technology to business problems and challenges. Our staff have worked in and around Cambridge since the early 90s, solving problems for numerous Software, Life Sciences,  Electronics and R&D driven companies.

The Microsoft Virtual Desktop Licensing Conundrum

Typically, large established software companies take a long time to alter their licensing and pricing to accommodate new models of use or methods of deployment. Just as many companies initially refused to support or license their server software in a virtual environment, before eventually softening their position and in many cases re-working their license agreements to support or encourage server virtualisation, the same is true of VDI. The matter of reviewing licensing is made more difficult and slower by virtue of the fact that there is only 1 desktop Operating System provider who completely dominates the market.

While the importance of desktop OS choice is probably declining (in the face of application virtualisation, google apps, and tablet or embedded devices which to the user appear to “have no OS"), the case is currently that Microsoft completely controls the desktop. They feel less pressure to do anything with licensing than they did in the server market, where they had real competition.

360is recently reviewed the situation with Microsoft OS licensing for a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure service provider. Through our discussions with Microsoft, Citrix, and other software vendors we were able to unscramble the (current) conundrum around Microsoft desktop Operating System licensing in a VDI environment.

For an extract from the licensing section from our report "Multi-tenant Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Design" Read More.