Track Chair and Instructor:
 Barb Goldworm
President and Chief Analyst
FOCUS

Barb Goldworm has spent 30 years in systems and storage in various senior management, marketing, sales, technical and industry analyst positions with IBM, StorageTek, Novell, Enterprise Management Associates and several successful startup ventures. A frequent speaker at industry events, she also created and chaired Interop’s Network Storage Track. More recently, she was one of the top 3 ranked analyst/ knowledge expert speakers at SNW and has been a regular expert speaker for TechTarget Webcasts and Ziff-Davis Summits and E-seminars. She also chaired the 2007 Server Blade Summit on Blades and Virtualization.

Barb has published extensively since the 1990s, writing regular columns for Network World and ComputerWorld, as well as numerous business and technical white papers and articles on systems, software, storage, storage networking and enterprise management. She currently writes a regular column for TechTarget SearchServerVirtualization. In 2007, she published a book entitled "Blade Servers and Virtualization: Transforming Enterprise Computing While Cutting Costs" commissioned by Wiley, available on Amazon.com.

Barb brings a unique blend of marketing and technical depth, both strategic and tactical, with experience in product management, product marketing, sales, market research, software development, project management and education.

Desktop Virtualization:

The "New" Desktop - Delivering Virtual Desktops and Appliances Anywhere

Monday, October 3, 9:00am – 4:30pm

The definition of a "desktop" is changing in many ways. Virtualization technologies have expanded and improved, offering better ways to deliver desktops and applications, ranging from VDI to session virtualization to streamed desktops to client hypervisors to Desktop as a Service. New devices continue to emerge and proliferate (including tablets, smartphones, thin clients and zero clients), and Bring Your Own Computer (BYOC) initiatives are gaining ground. As IT organizations consider the best strategy for delivering and supporting desktops and applications for the next decade, and address near-term issues like migration to Windows 7, IT has the opportunity to change the paradigm for delivering endpoint access to different types of users from any device, anywhere.

With Windows 7, IT is faced with managing the upgrade of every desktop and application in the company. Desktop and application virtualization can help this process significantly, and also help address the many desktop management problems that have been plaguing IT for decades. Virtualization also offers better ways to incorporate the new types of users and devices that continue to emerge. But until recently, multiple barriers prevented widespread adoption of virtual desktop technologies, and in fact, many early desktop virtualization projects failed as a result. This workshop will discuss these previous barriers, how they now mostly have been eliminated, and why now is the time to implement "the new desktop".

This workshop will cover desktop virtualization from the ground up, giving you everything you need to know to develop a strategy and select the right products and technologies for your needs. Desktop virtualization is much broader than VDI. What are all of the available desktop and application virtualization technologies, and where/how do they apply in your environment? More importantly, how can your IT organization assess desktop requirements across the entire organization and leverage the appropriate technologies to deal with the daily demands of provisioning, administering, securing and supporting hundreds or thousands of corporate desktops and applications for a wide variety of user types? Learn about all the various options available today - from major virtualization vendors to emerging startups - and why one size does not fit all. Hear the latest about the available desktop and application virtualization technologies, how to assess user desktop requirements across your entire organization, and determine how to successfully select and implement the right technologies for your organization.

Attendees will gain:

• An understanding of the current state of desktop and application virtualization, including barriers eliminated, available technologies and solutions and how they map to various use cases
• A methodology for evaluating your user requirements and determining which technologies and combined approaches are best suited for your users' needs
• Insights into the interrelationships between desktop, session, application and user virtualization including the role of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) versus session virtualization technologies such as Citrix XenApp and MS Remote Desktop Services (RDS)/Terminal Services; client hypervisors and offline VDI; application virtualization technologies such as MS App-V; and the critical role of user virtualization and personalization
• A deeper understanding of the various approaches and architectures of the different desktop virtualization, application virtualization and user virtualization/personalization technologies
• A broad perspective from an independent look at the top desktop, application and user virtualization solutions available
• Considerations for developing strategies for the selection and implementations of these technologies
• Knowledge about desktop access device choices (from iPads and rich clients to thin clients to zero clients), how they fit into the new BYOC (bring your own computer) initiatives, and how to integrate them into various approaches and technologies
• The latest improvements in handling 3D graphics and video for session and desktop virtualization
• An update on all the recent changes and future directions of desktop and application virtualization
• Insights into all the vendor alternatives and experiences involving the different approaches to delivering desktops and applications to all types of users and devices

Who Should Attend:
This workshop targets IT managers and administrators who are involved in the planning, implementation and support of desktop and application delivery through virtualization, and how to evaluate and integrate various access devices into those plans. It is geared for those interested in developing a deeper knowledge of virtual desktops, session/presentation virtualization, application virtualization, and user virtualization/personalization technologies to better design and implement a forward thinking strategy for desktop and application delivery within their companies.

You Will Learn:
During this workshop, industry analysts as well as virtualization experts from FOCUS and key desktop and application delivery players will detail methodologies, approaches, technologies and solutions available for desktop, application and user virtualization.

Registration packages with access to this workshop:

• Flex Pass
• Virtualization Days