Enter stage left a Microsoft ESC!

Thank you Justin for the handover and have a great holiday. 

Hello to you all, a little background before we get underway.  I work for Microsoft Consultancy Services  (MCS) as an Enterprise Strategy Consultant in the UK working across the breath of Microsoft technologies and striving to add value to our customer business through the use and deployment of Microsoft  technologies.

For the past 10 months Justin and myself have evangelized the use of SoftGrid within Microsoft UK customer base.  During our travels we have experienced a number of different challenges being faced by customers.  However why SoftGrid and what are the problems that we are attempting to solve.

Applications are sticky right? what do I mean by sticky I hear you say.   They add values to the registry, they put files in strange places, they install drivers, depend on services and other things too.  Once you install an application, your clean OS is compromised right? 

In essence what is one of the main drivers for the lack of new OS adoption and enabling a business to unlock the value that a new OS can bring? That's right you have guessed it its the application portfolio. 

So what options do you have open to you to help solve the pain that is the application estate?

All of these options aid in dulling the pain of the application issue however do not really address the core issue that application are sticky between the OS and hardware.

Consider managing your application estate virtually.  Applications are deployed to your end devices PC's or Terminal servers, consume local resources and are not in fact installed into the OS.  Now that would be worth considering right!  The answer is SoftGrid, however SoftGrid is not the sliver bullet and should form part of our overall Desktop and Thin Client strategy.  Keep posted as we take a walk through the world of Virtualisation.