In 2008, we saw ‘endpoint virtualization’ come into its
own. We saw economic need drive adoption due to the
technology’s ability to help organizations save real dollars;
we saw supporting technologies, such as network reliability and
bandwidth reach the levels necessary to enable efficient
application and OS streaming; and we saw IT recognize the ability
of application virtualization to create more secure data.
All of this has pushed endpoint virtualization towards the
inevitable outcome that all successful technologies reach: becoming
mainstream. Undoubtedly, 2008 brought with it a flurry of new
companies dipping their toes into the endpoint virtualization pool.
As a result, the cost of the technology has come down, and as the
cost continues to go down, the door to even greater advancements in
2009 is opening up at a fast pace.
A standards-based approach
The first major innovation to endpoint virtualization we will see
in 2009 is the establishment of a standards-based approach. When a
new technology is developed, such as say, endpoint virtualization,
it typically falls outside the arena of established
standards—that is, after all, part of what makes it new.
However, as the technology becomes more mainstream this becomes a
major complexity issue. Often, vendors begin pitting their own
standards against those of other vendors, leaving IT administrators
with a confusing mess of incongruence that they are usually left to
sort out themselves.
However, most of the major endpoint virtualization vendors are
beginning to realize the need for a standards-based approach for
accomplishing the many tasks of endpoint virtualization, such as
the formatting for application packaging and deployment. For end
point virtualization to succeed, it is important that as the
industry moves toward a standardized approach, ensuring that
everything possible is done to comply with existing standards as
opposed to create new ones. This may mean the road to
standardization is a bit more arduous, but in the end it will
prevent from happening what was intended to be eradicated in the
first place: more complexity. A real movement toward
standardization is also what will drive convergence in local
computing and cloud-based services, allowing IT and end-users to
have a best of both worlds model, instead of being forced to choose
one approach by a single vendor.
A unified set of management
tools
The second major advance we will see in 2009 is the development of
a common set of management tools. One of the overall goals of
endpoint virtualization is to simplify IT management. The problem
is that most management solutions that came to market before and
during 2008 are only capable of managing traditional or virtual
environments, but not both. This being the case, in order to
effectively manage their infrastructures, IT administrators who
have implemented endpoint virtualization have to use an assortment
of tools to keep all the environments in their
infrastructure—traditional, virtual and hybrid—in
check.
A good solution to this issue would be to have multiple tools
using multiple methods to manage all possible environments, but all
from the same vendor. A better solution, however, would be one tool
that uses
multiple management methods all from one vendor. The ideal
solution, however, would be one solution from one vendor that uses
one method to manage all environments.
At this point, the industry cannot even claim to provide a good
solution, let alone the best. However, in 2009 we will see great
advancements in this area. Already, many companies are signing on
to support non-traditional approaches from vendors, such as
packaging solutions that create virtualized applications. Many
vendors are including application virtualization, streaming and
light weight local virtual machine support in their larger
management frameworks, mostly by way of OEM agreements, while they
determine their own long term strategies.
Perhaps above all else, 2009 will see endpoint virtualization
continue to deliver on its promise: enable the information
resources that businesses depend on to be protected more
completely, managed more easily and controlled automatically
– all with greater visibility, increased cost savings and
more confidence.