Many of the blogs on the DABCC Web site are valuable sources of in-depth analysis and comment on the technology of virtualization. My role is much more basic, but, I hope, equally important. Over the coming months I will strive to bring feedback on our customers' reactions to the concepts and realities of application streaming and application environment virtualization.
We will look at how organizations deal with the apparently conflicting concepts of 'on-demand' application provision and tight centralised license management. What are organizations' concerns about their entitlement to move application copies around their PCs, to minimize the number of licenses they need to buy? Does this effectively constitute concurrent use licensing, when the purchased licenses are clearly intended for permanent installation? Is there a sensible, acceptable level of dynamic re-allocation that would be acceptable to pragmatic application vendors?
And what about the user experience - the speed with which a newly streamed application can be opened? Will the environment be set up to just stream the requested components, or to deliver the whole application?
What is the key difference, for the customer, between streaming and 'classic' software distribution? Can that difference be translated into a business case? To put it crudely, what does this great technology really do for the typical organization and typical CIO?
We will be tackling these questions and many more, based on what we learn in discussion with our customers.