Smarter minds reading this blog will recall the “Third Way,” which was a political strategy contrived between Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to find middle ground between liberal and conservatives (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way).
As I spoke with Dan O’Farrell, Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Dell Cloud Client Computing, and Manish Bhaskar, Director, Product Management at Dell Cloud Client Computing discuss the Dell Wyse WSM cloud computing paradigm, I felt like I was seeing a “third way” to deploy cloud-based virtual desktop solutions to customers. In reality, I was supposed to share the WSM 6 release (more on that in a moment. But first I want to introduce you to a “third way” to deploy cloud desktops (the other two being VDI and VPN). WSM is software that supports virtual desktops (http://www.wyse.com/products/software/cloud/WSM). It’s like having all the security and management ease of VDI *but* having local processor activity. In effect, the Wyse dumb terminal is now smarter.
It wasn’t lost on O’Farrell and Bhaskar that the Windows XP migration madness will create a “window” of opportunity for customers to consider WSM as the migration path/upgrade approach to Windows 7/8 and pivot how they actually do computing!
I asked about the customer demographic. WSM is applicable to any vertical by strongest in education, federal government and health care. Its sweet spot is 100 desktops to several thousands, so it’s really in the M-zone of the SMB space. It wasn’t lost on me that the client licensing was more costly than Microsoft, but cheaper than Citrix at $129/perpetual license.
As I mentioned earlier in my blog, I wanted to provide additional information on Dell Cloud Client Computing’s version 6 of Dell Wyse WSM desktop and application virtualization software. This new release adds server provisioning capability to help organizations harness the benefits of virtualization and cloud computing, while simplifying management and deployment processes and helping to reduce costs. By adding on-demand server provisioning to Dell’s end-user computing portfolio, Dell Wyse WSM 6 offers another alternative that helps organizations quickly stand up new servers where and when needed, and gives employees and students secured access to content regardless of location.
Dell Wyse WSM delivers operating systems and applications separately to stateless, diskless clients on demand, providing a manageable, reliable and scalable PC computing experience from the cloud. Unlike traditional VDI, Dell Wyse WSM enables the desktop OS and applications to execute locally on the client, giving that client the same look, performance, feel and function of a traditional desktop PC, but storing all OS, applications, and data in the datacenter. With no OS residing on the client, management, support and updates, including Windows XP and Windows 7 migrations, are done centrally and take considerably less time than with a traditional distributed environment.
In addition to desktop and application virtualization, Dell Wyse WSM 6 now also enables rapid and efficient server image delivery to physical or virtual machines. This new feature allows for more agile deployment, configuration and management of virtual servers than existing methods – processes that previously took hours are reduced to minutes.
Dell Wyse WSM is designed for large or small customers with demanding user or server management requirements, looking to optimize IT efficiency and cut costs. By reducing hardware needs and administration demands, Dell Wyse WSM helps customers achieve their system reliability, security and compliance goals.
