Client of the Future: Capabilities, Considerations and Costs

This was a really good session and one that will be hard to illustrate without the slide desk. Once I have it, am happy to take people through it in more detail.

The session was run by one of the Strategists from the 'War on Costs' team internal to MS. It covered how previously the aim was to get standardised and locked down and make one size fits all. However now and into the future this is no longer true. We are shifting to being more user centric from device centric and should be looking at multiple ways to address their needs rather than the one size fits all approach.

This is good as it is what I have been pitching for a couple of years. One problem you have when trying to justify this is TCO, having a cost based model is not great for:
- emerging technologies which start off more expensive but give you competitive advantage
- solutions with a high upfront cost (typically we will have this problem for premium services in our software catalog - how do we make it fair to the sites that take the higher cost early on?)
- where value is only for a subset of users (e.g. VDI for our business partners)

TCO also does not measure, agility, efficiency, flexibility and productivity.

The presenter stated that a new model is needed which provide the 4 pillars of business value:

1. Direct cost
2. Agility
3. Quality of Service
4. Governance, risk, management and compliance

By building your cost models with these themes in mind you will get a more balanced view of what will work.

Next steps are to assess the various solutions against these and see what will be a good fit for your portfolio. Again there was a number of steps to go through before having a user centric environment.

I'll leave the recap here, but hopefully it was enough to give you a taste. Once I get the slides I can elaborate further, but the detail on them and the pace he was going was more than I could get good notes down for and I'd like to do it justice.

To give a bit more background, this was the abstract:

Application virtualization? Workspace virtualization? Desktop virtualization? Composite desktops? Desktops-as-a-service? In an ever-more-complex game of "buzzword bingo" it has become very difficult to compare vendor offerings and choose the client-computing technologies and capabilities that will help you succeed as a business. This session leverages the "War on Cost" team's most recent research into client computing, and provides a framework for comparing the capabilities and considerations of emerging client models.

We'll compare the costs, benefits, and optimal use-cases for application virtualization, desktop virtualization and more; we'll discuss the impacts of each model on desktop deployment and management, datacenter workloads, application delivery, user productivity and business agility; and we'll highlight the key factors and best practices that must be considered when aligning your desktop strategy with business priorities. This session will equip you to make well-informed choices as you work to implement an agile and effective next-generation client-computing environment that meets your business needs.