HP’s Approach to Desktop Virtualization

My former colleague Dan Kusnetzky  has made some interesting comments about HP’s approach to desktop virtualization.  As he correctly points out, overall the company’s got a very broad reach in terms of their potential hooks into the market. And while Microsoft and VMware have gotten a lot of industry attention over the last few months, the large system vendors are starting to get their ducks lined up in virtualization and will without a doubt become forces to be reckoned with. (Editor-in-chief Doug Barney wrote extensively about all these suppliers in our May/June issue.)

I recently had a chance to sit down with Roberto Moctezuma, vice president and general manager of HP’s Desktop Solutions Organization. The timing was perfect since I’m working on a feature on hosted desktop virtualization for our next issue. We had a free-ranging discussion but a few items were especially noteworthy. Roberto has HP’s thin client business under his purview as well as HP Blade Workstation, HP Blade PC, and partner-based solutions from VMware and Citrix. He sees a number of important drivers for what Forrester calls hosted desktop virtualization and what Gartner calls server-based client virtualization (glad we can all agree on the terminology!).

In addition to the usual drivers such as an increasingly mobile workforce and green IT, Roberto pointed out another: outsourcing abroad. HP customers with major outsourced operations (such as call centers) have been telling the company they need to better protect data and intellectual property and hosted desktop is a way to do this.

Roberto also showed me the HP phone he was using (who knew?). A few months ago, his group made an interesting announcement about mobile thin clients (this is iPhone territory folks), the HP 2533t Mobile Thin Client which weighs three pounds and provides both 3G and WLAN access. More recently, as part of HP’s virtualization blitz, the group announced the new HP t5630, t5545, t5540 and t5145 Thin Clients and enhancements to the HP Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Included in this are “Citrix Ready” blade PCs and thin clients certified for Citrix XenDesktop environments.

Posted by Tom Valovic on 09/14/2008 at 12:49 PM