Anyone who has suffered and snickered through my previous blogs will know I am a huge fan of “stateless” computing. Namely  – the removal of all user state from the device that is in your hands or at your fingertips.  Incrementally – we all (ecosystem) have been trending this way though many are calling it other things with “cloud or XaaS” getting the most mileage.

My favorite video on YouTube is one from 1997 where Steve Jobs paints such a vivid picture of his vision (sadly never executed on by Apple in PC’s but robustly in phones and tablets  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSxHd-ZJ080 .

What gets me is the notion of “rich andapple_jobs_returns robust local applications combined with cloud services”. Now he does not come right out and use the term cloud – but if you have a few minutes – you’ll get it.

I believe that your settings, data, documents, applications, admin policies, etc should all live in a cloud whether it be private or public with only the hardware and an OS in front of you (note: with VDI, or published apps I am cool with the OS being afar as well). These are the SERVICES Steve talks about.

The reason I believe this is the future is that Moores Law spoiled us and we threw cheap hardware, with expensive software at just about every problem. We let scale slip out of our control. We now want to solve this.  With networks, responsive drives, and solutions to allow us to separate these layers – its up to US to craft these architectures.

We want to effect change ONCE and have it touch all users, some users, most users, or the users we want it to. I am here to say. We are there

The last bastion to fall, IMHO was and is applications. With the 4 million windows apps out there (typically statically installed and bound to hardware) published by ISV’s (independent software vendors) this is quite a long tail to wag and absolutely positively thwarted stateless computing. No more.

Over the past decade we began to see some apps very robustly become “uninstalled” and run as cloud or SaaS based. Awesome. For over 20 years Citrix has been affording companies of all sizes the ability to remotely manage and publish applications. Awesome. Application Virtualization solutions like App-V or Thinapp were fantastic at “uninstalling” some apps (roughly 65% success rate) and allowing us to deliver the virtual bubbles to windows workspaces of all flavors.  However, with SaaS, published, and virtualized apps – there still were apps left behind for a myriad of technical, use case, financial, and user experience reason

This is where application layering is going to once and for all allow us to complete the missing puzzle pieces, and together with UEM (user environment management) deliver every single application, every document, setting, profile and policies to truly stateless workspaces. This is indeed the Golden Age of the Golden Image.

You will hear us talk a lot about Application Strategy now that our application layering solution FlexAppâ„¢ has been released to massive customer applause. The reason is – we all now have the ability – with technology that exists TODAY – to truly attain a Golden Image that is an operating system and nothing more. With Microsoft helping us all manage Windows10 and more prolific and consistent networking capacity and speeds….we will retake the sprawl and scale that got away from us and harness scale like never before.

Cool.

T.Rex

@T_REX_VDI

Circa October 2015