The much heralded “year of VDI” will not happen in 2014 despite the huge popularity of BYOD and the technical issues that creates for CIOs, says Managing Consultant of The 1610 Group and Wikibon Analyst and frequent contributor in his Professional Alert, “CIOs Will Never See the Year of the Virtual Desktop”. Nor will 2015 or 2016 see the mass adoption of VDI. In fact, writes the former CIO, we will never see the “year of VDI”.

That does not mean that VDI use will not grow. But it will be confined largely to traditional VDI-type environments such as phone centers, where groups of employees with little need for special applications will use it on terminals to access virtual desktops on a server. It will probably not gain considerable traction as a solution for delivering customized enterprise services to populations of employee mobile devices. A variety of other options provide better solutions to that issue.

The problem for end-users

I have come to agree. Earlier this year I was fairly enthusiastic about VDI as a solution to the problem of delivering a suite of enterprise IT services to a large, diverse population of end-user desktop and mobile devices in a BYOD environment. That was until I tried it. Of course as a freelance writer, not an employee of an organization supporting VDI, what I used, or attempted to use, is not really VDI. But I do access applications on my Windows 7 desktop computer (my version of a server) on my Android tablet, using “Splash Desktop”, which gives a close approximation of the end-user experience.

I can use this technology to open and close Windows applications and make or edit entries. But it is very slow and awkward, things often don’t work the way I want, and I would never attempt to do serious work — for instance write an article — over this technology. And that is when I am connecting from one part of my house to another. Connecting over the Internet from a remote location is tricky at best. As a result I almost never use it.

The problem here is the conflict between the Windows and mobile models of operation. Windows 7 expects a mouse/keyboard interface that does not translate well to the touchscreen/voice interface of mobile systems. Then the different size screens and the network layer also add complexity. And for some reason, some activities are inverted. If I want to scroll up on the screen I need to pull my finger down the tablet screen.  And this is on an 11” tablet — I would not begin to try this on my smartphone where I would get lost just trying to navigate the screen. As a result I almost never use it.

Instead I use native Android applications such as OfficeSuite Pro whenever possible on my tablet, and SaaS services when I must. And for things that I cannot do easily on my tablet and Windows applications that don’t have Android equivalents, I take my laptop with me when I travel, keep it in my hotel room and carry my tablet and smartphone when I go out.

Alternatives to VDI for mobile service delivery

Scott lists several options for delivering enterprise services to mobile devices:

• Do nothing,

• Use session virtualization aka remote desktop services,

• Use cloud services such as Amazon to run Windows applications on mobile devices.

To these I would add two important options:

• SaaS services,

• Comprehensive mobile management suite’s such as IBM’s MobileFirst.

I keep coming back to MobileFirst because it promises an elegant, layered solution to delivering and managing enterprise services in a form customized to each different device in a BYOD environment. It allows IT to:

• Develop mobile applications such as front-ends to enterprise services once and then automatically create versions for various mobile platforms (Silverlight),

• Deploy and manage them across a large, diversified population of employee or customer end-user devices easily,

• Maintain high levels of security.

This is an elegant approach to managing a BYOD environment that is thoroughly tested — IBM uses it to manage its own internal huge population of employee devices — and that is totally device agnostic. IBM does not sell mobile devices and so has no corporate loyalties to one platform over another.

Facing the mobile management problem

I expect in 2014 companies will begin to come to grips with the problem of delivering and managing a comprehensive suite of IT services equivalent to the corporate desktop image to employee mobile devices. Some will try VDI, but most of those will quickly find that inadequate and rejected by users. Instead they will adapt an approach that includes commercially available software, SaaS and other online services that provide front-ends customized for the mobile experience, and internally developed equivalents of custom internal IT services that duplicate those provided to end-user desktops.