This year has already kicked off with those speculating that we have moved to a “post-PC” era, the idea that the future of PCs is in jeopardy. While this viewpoint is shared by those vendors looking to move forward their positioning and lines of business, we feel that the call of a post-PC era is inaccurate at best, as it does not address the hundreds of millions of PCs and thousands of corporate Windows applications that are in use today, along with continuous improvement of the Windows line of operating system. Hence, the post-PC era discussion is short-sighted and leaves too many business professionals in the dark.

We believe the best solution to address the needs of both current and future businesses would be to define this era as “PC-plus.” Coined this way by IDC’s Bob O’Donnell, the PC-plus era highlights the operational scenario where Windows and non-Windows devices are co-existing. This delicate balance will remain as an ongoing opportunity for those enterprises looking to embrace all current and forthcoming devices.

One direction that VDI vendors are pushing for is to eliminate the need for Windows physical devices by serving Windows applications on hosted virtual desktops in the data center and letting the various devices remote into the hosted desktops using remote desktop protocols.

This scenario may work under some circumstances, but does not address the countless scenarios where the end user wants their device to act like their device, and not some 50% version that doesn’t leverage the device’s full resources and rich user-interface, cannot operate offline, and whose performance is affected by network latency for every operation they make.  Furthermore, the user experience of accessing Windows apps using tablets with touch interfaces is very limited and should be used scarcely.

We believe in an alternative model for the PC-plus era, which blends remote and local execution.  In this model, users will have the ability to use their non-Windows devices for native apps, as well as remote to Windows apps over a hosted virtual environment for occasional read-mostly purposes (e.g., when their Windows device is not with them), but will continue to use their laptops for generational day-to-day “read-write” activities – with a constant synchronization between the work spaces of the various devices.

We don’t see this type of scenario happening in the next few hours or days. The PC-plus era is a time for IT to find the best fit for their business that can address end user experience without compromise.

This quote exemplifies the dilemma of IT — how to bridge the gap between user experience and cost-effective endpoint management. Furthermore, the challenge of supporting adequate user-experience is far greater when the managed endpoints are mobile laptops, especially those used by knowledge workers or power users. These users are accustomed to rich user-interfaces. They need to execute their advanced applications quickly, and must be able to work offline. Further, they do not want to depend on network latency for every keyboard stroke or mouse click they make.

What if there was a solution that could, as Ragland says, “…store [the desktops] on the server, where we can manage everything”  but do this without degrading the user-experience? This is the objective that we challenged ourselves to address when we founded Wanova. Now — 2 years later this vision is fully realized with the Mirage product. The key idea is to centralize the desktop contents in their entirety in the data center for total manageability, protection, and support, but turn the endpoints into caching devices that execute the workloads locally. This way, IT has all desktops in the data center, while users get the rich experience they want. What’s more, IT does not need to forklift upgrade their data center infrastructure to centrally host and power these thousands of desktops. With Wanova’s distributed design, only a small fraction of server and storage resources is required. We leverage extensive deduplication to reduce storage requirements, and because the applications execute on the endpoints, the server is used primarily for management. In fact, the same server that could host maybe a few dozen thin clients can support a thousand Wanova-managed endpoints.

So – IT enjoys all the benefits of centralized desktops –  central management, backup, continuity, migration, provisioning and support — while end users stay fully productive. Sound too good to be true? Why don’t you try it out for yourself ?

Most notably, laptop users, who outnumber fixed desktop users in most enterprises, require the ability to work offline. They also need a predictable response time for each mouse click or keyboard stroke they make, regardless of network bandwidth or latency.  However, when such users are away from their laptops for some reason (e.g., they lost their PC, or are traveling without it), access to their desktop using a thin-client protocol would be an ideal alternative.

So, how can we reconcile between thin and thick requirements ?

We propose that the future of desktop virtualization lies in “the flex desktop” where the logical desktop is untethered from its physical hardware. This desktop can be centralized and uniformly managed in the data center, but can also be dynamically mobilized, quickly, to the proper endpoint according to business requirements.

We’ve heard from many customers and prospects that this agility would, at minimum, create some valuable use cases, and from some who believe it could fundamentally change desktop management altogether. What do you think?

So a valid question to ask is — What is the applicability of Wanova in the enterprise ?

The following 4 points answer this question by summarizing the breadth and depth of our coverage in the enterprise and demonstrating its wide applicability.

1. Wanova optimizes the user experience for mobile (laptop) and remote employees. In 2010, laptop users will outgrow fixed desktop users in the enterprise. As we all know, most laptop users, when given the freedom of mobility, will end up working from multiple locations, including office, home, and their favorite Starbucks, as well as offline. So supporting “offline and remote users” really covers the majority of enterprise users today!

2. Wanova supports both fixed endpoints and VMs. Nothing in the Wanova architecture limits its use to laptops. In fact, one of the main advantages of Wanova is that it provides a uniform solution that covers fixed, mobile, virtual, and physical endpoints. Some customers have even asked us about supporting their servers. While this is currently not the focus of our development, our architecture does not limit this use case.

3. In addition to broad user coverage, Wanova provides depth of capabilities that further expand its applicability in the enterprise. Specifically, in addition to efficient single image management, Wanova’s protection capabilities allow centralized backup and fast restore, eliminating the need for client backups and ensuring remote/mobile employees are up and running in minutes on a new hardware. Wanova also provides support capabilities, such as centralized troubleshooting and fast re-imaging, allowing support engineers to quickly address user problems.

4. Finally, Wanova is complementary and synergistic with traditional server-hosted solutions. Specifically, the Wanova Centralized Virtual Desktop (CVD) can be re-assigned, within minutes, to execute on a VM in the data-center, and then accessed by a thin client protocol. This gives users the flexibility to determine dynamically whether they want to run their CVD on the endpoint cache, or on a central VM. For example, if a user loses her laptop, she can reassign her personal CVD onto a VM in the data center and access it remotely using a thin client protocol until a new hardware is provided to her. She can then reassign the same CVD to the new hardware, while all the updates she has made during this period will be automatically synchronized to the new hardware within minutes.

For more details on the “how” see our product section in http://wanova.com/pages/wanova-products.html