I am always curious to see who Time Magazine picks as the Person of the Year because their pick not only honors that person's achievements but more importantly, it recognizes a key theme or trend that was a major focus for all of us that year.


I wish Time would do the same for companies - if they did, my pick for 2010 would be the Small to Medium Enterprise (SME).SME's today can enjoy the same superior technology infrastructure, sophisticated forecasting applications, and cutting edge innovations for a fraction of the costs that large enterprises paid for these innovations.

Who would have thought a few years back that you could now have a global CDN for pennies, thanks to cloud computing players like Amazon, or that for a few dollars a month, you could have sophisticated sales forecasting or marketing automation applications thanks to the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies.

These "as-a-Service" and cloud  innovations with flexible pay-as-you-go models level the playing field, enabling SMEs to compete with the same level of sophistication as the big guys.  But, there is one area where this cost disruption has not yet happened - on-premise virtualization.

Virtualization infrastructure still requires massive datacenter buildouts, with expensive shared storage, and custom built setups that are complex and labor-intensive to manage.   But it doesn't have to be - especially not with desktop virtualization.  Virtualizing deskotps streamlines and drastically cuts down desktop support costs, improves uptime, and gives companies a competitive edge where it matters most - its employees' productivity.  This is of value not just to large enterprises, but perhaps even more to SME's, who have to do more with less.

Which is why Kaviza has re-designed the hosted desktop virtualization stack so companies do not require the expensive datacenter buildouts or shared storage pools to run virtual desktops - for under $500/desktop, starting with as few as 25 desktops, a company can quickly and cost-effectively get immediate ROI on virtual desktops with Kaviza.  Try it for yourself, and see how Kaviza is changing the game in desktop virtualization.

Labels: Cloud Computing, Desktop Virtualization, desktop virtualization. VDI cost, Person of the Year, SaaS, SME, Time Magazine, virtual dekstops

VMWare's executive recently talked about how he believes Windows 7 will be a catalyst for desktop virtualization, but expects adoption to be slow. What he doesn't tell you is an important reason why: cost. If its going to cost you $1000-2000/desktop to upgrade from XP to Windows 7 either with traditional PCs or virtual desktops, CIOs are asking if its worth it.

Gartner's VP Research, Michael Silver estimates that when you include replacement hardware, admin costs, application testing, and replacing incompatible apps, -- in a hypothetical organization with 2,500 Windows users -- the cost of upgrading from Windows XP to Windows 7 will run $1,035 to $1,930 per user. For 2,500 users, this is a $2.5M-$5M effort, which is substantial. Migrating to first generation VDI architectures such as View would be no cheaper. Analysts estimate the average upfront cost/desktop to be $1,200-2,000 for traditional VDI.

But what if you could upgrade from XP to Windows 7 for under $500/desktop, and get all the benefits of virtual desktops, with lower operating costs, greater security and the option to preserve the XP desktops to smoothen migration woes?

We are announcing today Windows 7 support with Kaviza's VDI-in-a-box^TM , a beta is coming in the next few weeks. You can get a Windows 7 virtual desktop for under $500, and this includes all the hardware, software licensing and storage costs. We are already getting a lot of partner and customer interest in this, so its going to be exciting!

Click here for a free trial of Kaviza's VDI-in-a-box^TM.

Labels: desktop virtualization. VDI cost, PC upgrade, VMWare, Windows 7, Windows 7 cost

Labels: Brian Madden, desktop virtualization. VDI cost, Kaviza