The first time I became familiar with the term Bring Your Own was when I traveled through Australia with my wife and oldest son back in the year 2000. It basically means that you are allowed to bring your own bottle of wine to a restaurant and just pay a corkage fee.

Nowadays we hear a lot about companies that consider implementing a BYOC policy meaning that they allow their employees to bring their own computer to work. The idea behind this concept is that companies intend to save money by allowing their users to use their own personal computer instead of having to provide them with a company owned device. In simple words, companies give their employees some money and tell them: Go buy yourself a PC with a 3 year warranty contract, if you have a problem later, fix it yourself.

Now I see some of you thinking No Way, not in my company!. I agree that there is a kind of a contradiction here because during the past 10 years we have all learned that we can only reduce costs by driving standardization meaning keep the number of different hardware as low as possible and have a common configuration across all managed clients. The BYOC approach appears to to move into the opposite direction.

So is this a good thing or not? To be honest at this stage I am neither for or against it. As a Technology Consultant who works within the desktop management space for many large global companies I see quite some challenges and threads, but that doesn’t mean that I am against the concept as such. I rather think it’s the same as with Virtualization, one size doesn’t fit all, meaning that for some companies or certain user groups the BYOC approach might well fit but definitely not for their entire workforce.

Although BYOC is not a Technology, If we take Gartner’s Hype Cycle, I believe we are currently at Stage 1 – Technology Trigger.

Many people are talking about BYOC, some even have serious plans to move towards the BYOC concept, but we haven’t seen many large companies that have implemented it, most likely because there are quite some things to consider. I’ll speak more about these in Bring Your Own Computer – Part 2.

At present when searching for BYOC information on the web, you will automatically hit on Citrix and Intel who both have or are running BYOC pilots. More information about the Citrix BYOC initiative can be found here and here. Citrix has been quite smart in taking the lead in the BYOC space, because they do provide the Technology that companies will need to consider when applying the BYOC concept. With Citrix XenApp or XenDesktop you can connect with any device to the corporate network but still get access to all centrally managed applications. Have a look at my other blog post XenApp Demos from the Cloiud and you will see how that works.

Now this is a kind of interesting because in the early days of VDI it was often seen as an ultimate cost saver, but meanwhile we have learned that this isn’t always the case, again one size doesn’t fit all. According to Brian Madden looking at the Hype Cycle VDI today is at Stage 3 – Trough of Disillusionment. If we take into account how long it took VDI to get to stage 3, I’m sure it will take a while until we see BYOC widely implemented. Nevertheless I’m almost certain BYOC is something we’ll see more often in the near future and my advice is that even if you have the biggest objections or concerns with the BYOC concept start thinking of how you would handle it within your environment.

Additional Information / Articles about BYOC:

Bring Your Own PC Reinvents The Corporate PC: A Citrix Systems Case Study

BYOC Demystified – Part 1

BYOC Demystified – Part 2

BYOC Demystified – Part 3

Bring your own PC comes despite vexed IT pros

ATR: Bring Your Own Computer

WindowsITPro – BYOC: Bring Your Own Computer

BYOPC – Bring Your Own PC

My Recent Presentation On Making BYOPC A Reality

Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) Policies

Ruben Spruijt has published an updated whitepaper “VDI Smackdown” which provides you with an overview of today’s VDI solutions. More details here

In these days we hear a lot about Desktop Virtualization and Application Virtualization. Last week-end someone asked me what I was currently doing and I told him that beside my normal day job, I am doing a number of Citrix trainings. Now let me mention that this person is just a regular user who doesn’t know anything about managing an Enterprise IT infrastructure, leave alone he would understand what Virtualization technology is about. Heck… how to explain Application Virtualization, Streaming, VDI to an ordinary mortal?

Well here we go, Citrix has a Test Drive for Citrix XenApp, you can access it through http://citrixcloud.net/. Just click on one of the Devices and register for a demo account, once submitted you will receive almost instantly a demo account and URL to connect to the Citrix XenApp Demo.

Once you have installed the Citrix Plug-in you’re ready to launch the Demo.

When launching Microsoft Word for the first time it took approx. 42 seconds to start it. Once started, i left Word open and launched Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Power Point, both started within approximately 5 seconds. I then closed all the Applications again and launched Excel, that took just 25 seconds to start. I left it open and launched Powerpoint and Word again, both opened within 5-10 seconds.

Below a screenshot from Power Point. It integrates seamlessly, you actually wouldn’t notice that the application isn’t executed locally.

if you haven’t seen XenApp in action, I definitely recommend you give this a try.

Those who are following my blog on a regular basis know that I am also interested in the history of IT. Since in these days Citrix (especially XenDesktop) has a high ranking on my personal list of interests, I spend some time today to find some information about the History of Citrix. So here we go:

A Deep Dive Into the 20 Year History and Technical Developments of Citrix Systems, a video from BriForum 2009 (Highly recommend this one, very interesting !).

Brad Pedersen Reflects on 20 Years at Citrix

Significant Events in the History of Citrix

Citrix Systems, Inc. – Company Profile, Information, Business Description, History, Background Information on Citrix Systems, Inc.

20 Years of Citrix History

I had the pleasure to look at the XenClient a few months ago when it was still under development, but now anyone can download it from the XenClient Citrix web site. Never heard of XenClient before? Well then watch the video, I’m sure one or the other is going to like this.

Today Hypervisors are classified into two types. Type 1 is the so-called native bare metal hypervisor and type 2 the hosted hypervisor. Within the server based computing world there are various products available based on Type 1 (VMWare ESX Server, Citrix XEN Server) or Type 2 (Microsoft Hyper-V, VMWare Server).

Within the Desktop computing space most of us have rather been using Type2 based solutions such as VMWare Workstation or Microsoft VirtualPC.

With Citrix XenClient we will soon get a Type1 Hypervisor for client systems. So what is this good for? Well let’s assume you have a need to run two different versions of Windows on your laptop. You can either install both OS on the system and use a dual boot scenario, or what most of us do in these days, install one OS on the physical hardware and virtualize the second one on top of the primary OS using a desktop virtualization solution such as VMWare Workstation, Windows Virtual PC or Sun’s VirtualBox.

The downside of these approaches are that you can either only run one operating system at a time (Dual Boot option) or that running the Virtualized OS requires that you first boot the primary OS that hosts the Virtualization Software.

With the XenClient you can actually run both (or more) operating systems in parallel right on top of a Type1 Hypervisor. Once you have the Operating systems installed you can easily switch between desktops with a single keyboard shortcut, but you can also share applications between the two operating system sessions.

So who is going to use this ? Well I can think of various use cases. Imagine the Application developer who has one or more operating system installed with all his development tools and most likely prefers to delete these periodically depending on what he is working on. But then he also requires access to his company’s business applications that are managed and brought to his client by the companies IT department. With XenClient, the developer can have full control over his own managed operating systems but also benefit from having a corporate managed standard desktop environment.

At the end of last year I had the pleasure to get my hands on the XenClient Beta and although I could not spend as much time with it as I  wanted to, I can say, that it all looks very promising. Unfortunately I have no information about when Citrix is going to release the XenClient but assume it will be sometimes in 2010.

Additional Resources:
Citrix XenClient Overview
XenClient Central
Local Virtual Machine-based Desktops
Patrick Gelsinger – Synergy Keynote Day 2 Part 1 (XenClient starts at 28 minutes)
Microsoft hates Type 1 client hypervisors

In this video Daniel Feller shares some best practices on how to design a Desktop Virtualization solution.

Additional Resources
Consulting Whitepapers for XenDesktop 3.0
Ask the Architect: Next-Generation Desktop