Skip to main content

Desktop in the Cloud - Dissecting Desktop user Experience

Desktop experience is essentially a combination of personalized profile storage, processing engine and Interaction Interface.

Personal Profile Storage: Profile consists of preferences such as background color, placement of programs on the screen, Documents (current and recent), Search Results, Alerts(new mail, IM, phone call), password keyring for cloud services, bookmarks, application data(registry entries/file locations) and any other items that are specific to the individual session.

Processing engine: The guts of desktop its cpu, memory, network and disk i/o capabilities that drive the performance and intuitiveness of the local and cloud applications such as office or graphics rich apps, Skype, webex etc.


Interaction interface: Keyboard, Mouse, Multi-Touch and Display. The elements that assist in user interface and interaction.

The trends in personalized storage are rapidly moving to cloud either as storage(google drive/dropbox) or as a synchronization platform(apple iCloud) or both (office 365)

Mobile Devices are changing the interaction paradigms with local and remote applications. There slowly replacing traditional desktops to emerge from one of the personal computing devices to the only personal computing device.

The need for strong processing engines still remains these processing engines could single threaded ones embedded in SaaS/PaaS Platforms or Dedicated Multi-purpose engines provided Virtual desktop(VDI) providers. 

There is a value to create hyper scale stateless physical hardware with virtual machine like provisioning and management feature to drive this processing engine innovation. 

VMware, Microsoft and Citrix may or may not be seeing value in physical device management but each of them have several products to assist this vision. On the open source front the moves by Canonical(Ubuntu) and ARM in the Microserver/hyperscale computing are very exciting.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ForeThought -- Global directory service for the Digital world

ForeThought Real world is full of people. We have phone books,yellow pages, maps and postal addresses to get to them. Real world is governed by laws, rules and norms. Digital world is full of devices and devices only(severs, desktops, appliances, gadgets etc..) In the digital world, We have DNS, IP Addresses/SMTP mail address, Routers/gateways. All of these methods are still rudimentery to lookup and locate attributes, features and functions of devices. Most devices serve a useful purpose. some of them are misused to inflict pain and damage in the digital world. Clear knowledge attributes, features and functions of devices can hel in reducing the risk and help us in responding to misuse of these devices. An idea of a Global Directory Service -- for locating Devices worldwide....These devices are attributed to People, Resources and Services.... This type of service can help in Asset tracking, Monitoring, Communications, Incident response, forensics and Da...
2 comments
Read more

Blueprint for a new ITaaS Service Provider

Cloud computing is raising the expectation on the agility, availability and access to sophisticated computing and communication platforms for small and medium business. Today most critical IT components for running a successful business are available as SaaS, PaaS or IaaS platforms. There is little value in recreating all these services from the scratch by a new age service provider. It may be prudent to create a skeletal platform for essential services while taking a position of services broker to organize a rich portfolio by aggregating important services into tightly knit IT-as-a –Service offering. The initial target market for such a service provider is Small and Medium Business. We will review aspirations and capabilities needed to serve the ever increasing expectations of small and medium customers from a modern service provider. The Vision, Strategy and Execution plan to create a modern Information Technology as a Service (ITaaS) provider infrastructure is described on the...
2 comments
Read more

RAINing Appliances in the Clouds

Appliances always had a soft-corner in Data center and cloud strategy. My Brush with appliances started in early 2000. We were looking at soultions for traffic management and billing for small ISP. the solutions with software and hardware were quite complicated. We came across small company out of Israel called Allot Networks (www.allot.com). they did a good job in a simple way. Later at NVIDIA, I was exposed Netapp for NAS storage which quickly pivoted into block storage with iscsi. they literally gave away the iscsi protocol license for free with the box for a long time. On the network side, my Exposure was with F5 networks while managing nvidia.com. We were facing scalability issues during product launhces and driver release announcements. We tried newer players such as Array Networks and Netscaler while they were in Beta. We ended up assisting and supporting Netscaler with our feedback to evolve the product to have in-memory caching. In VMworld 2013, I have seen a emergence ...
8 comments
Read more