'Desktop as a service' coming soon to a PC near you

Desktop virtualization as a service has gotten a big boost with Desktone Inc.'s announcement today of $17 million in venture capital funds that will allow the company to finance global sales, marketing, and development.

Desktone, a Chelmsford, Mass., startup offers what it says is the industry's first unified virtual desktop platform. I call it "desktop as a service." The company's turnkey solution provides enterprises an on-ramp to virtual desktop computing that integrates all virtualization layers -- storage, applications, client devices, servers, processing, and network technologies -- allowing them to be controlled from a single management console.

The ability to deliver a PC operating environment in a way users are accustomed to via grid/utility efficiencies in a way that appeals to the realities of enterprise IT departments and needs may be a seed that has a long way to grow. But compelling economics and the movement generally to services delivery portends a fast-growing new market segment for home, SMB and large business users. Telcos and cable providers will need to provide these kinds of services, for sure.

The first round of Desktone financing was co-led by Highland Capital Partners and SoftBank Capital. It also included Citrix Systems, Inc., a leader in application delivery infrastructure, and China-based Tangee International.

Desktone's management lineup boasts a collection of industry heavy hitters, including CEO Harry Ruda, formerly CEO of Softricity, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2006; COO Paul Gaffney, formerly CIO of Staples and a senior VP at Schwab Technology; CFO Michael Hentschel, who hails from Resilience, Avaterra, and TechVest Ventures; CTO Clint Battersby, who has over 15 years experience in LAN, WAN, Internet and storage acceleration; and executive VP Scott Andersen, former CEO of GlobalServe and Exist.

Ron Fisher of SoftBank Capital said his comnpany's interest in Desktone's technology was spurred by the growing need to manage large-scale PC and server environments. "Enterprises have a tremendous need to accelerate desktop virtualization adoption in a way that is cost-effective and simple, and doesn't drain IT resources," Fisher said.

The Desktone announcement comes on the heels of the news that Cisco Systems has plans to invest $150 million in virtualization giant VMWare, Inc. That news was accompanied by an announcement of a collaboration agreement between the two around joint development, marketing, customer and industry initiatives.

The stars and planets finally appear to be aligning in a way that makes utility-oriented delivery of a full slate of client-side computing and resources an alternative worth serious consideration. As more organizations are set up as service bureaus -- due to such IT industry developments as ITIL and shared services -- the advent of off the wire everything seems more likely in many more places.

Of course, there are those who will maintain that "software plus services" is the only best bet. The competition of the more fully virtualized desktop approaches like Desktone with the heavy, PC-based OS legacy can only be good for the IT use market -- and overall productivity.

Only a matter of time before Microsoft combines ad business with 'software plus services'

Looking over the reports from the Microsoft financial analysts gathering this week in Redmond, Wash., I'm reminded of baseball ... modern ballparks in particular.

Far as I know, most major league baseball teams have been profitable for many years, many decades. Most of the teams in large cities are doing better than ever, in spanking new stadiums.

What's different now is the explosion of advertisements, endorsements, sponsorships, hucksterism and crass visual commercialism. Whether you attend a game or watch one on television, there isn't a time or place where you are not treated to literally dozens of commercial pitches while you try and figure out the real pitches.

Why on Earth would people who love baseball, or even just tolerate baseball, allow such a plastering of advertisements across their consciousness (and perhaps unconsciousness)? Well, because they don't have a choice, of course.

Baseball, like Microsoft (and soon, Google?), is a monopoly. There are few if any real choices for most anyone who wants to watch a major league game but to incur the ad wrath.

And that's why it's only a matter of time before Microsoft starts injecting scads of ads through their "software plus services" portfolio. That's right, when you open your online (or offline or hybrid-line) applications for a spreadsheet, word processor, email, calendar, ERP interface -- just like you're now thoroughly accustomed to on Web pages and services -- there will be ads. Lots of them. Targeted right to you as an individual or business (or both) with your pre-analyzed budget to spend in anticipation

Local, state, regional, mobile, location-based, keyword-oriented, and fuzzy-warm branding types of ads. All over your visual perimeter -- just like at the ballpark -- you'll be served up ads, ads, ads while you toil away to offer more cookie crumbs of insight into what the next ad should be that you see. Attention!

The implications for this, of course, are enormous. If Microsoft and the other services providers -- for they will all have to follow suit, just like each ballpark followed the other -- can better target these ads to you based on your relationship with them and the technology cauldron that forms from your use of "software plus services," then all the other providers of platforms for online ads will be sunk.

We used to have the division of church and state between media editorial and advertising, but what of the division between technology and advertising? There isn't one. You may think you own your PC (vendors would differ) but you don't own the servers that toss up your "software plus services." You want to play ball? You gotta look at the ads. You gotta see the craplets.

Reminds me of the line from fictional Southie strongman Frank Costello in The Departed: "I don't want to be a product of my environment, I want my environment to be a product of me." You, dear readers, will be a product of the environment that your "software plus services" provider wants for you, based on what's good for their investors.

Even, over the next 3 to 10 years, as the newspaper business thinks it can reinvent its paper-based revenue streams from the Internet, in comes the IT vendors. These "software plus services" providers will -- from start-up of the first craplets when you turn the thing on until the last mouse click before you die -- have you pegged. They will know what you want before you do. No other entity can better match ads to users than a combined IT platform provider and online services provider whose business is based on advertising revenue. The marketers will finally have the tools they've always wanted.

And so those other media company web sites that dish up the highest-quality content, that provide top-line fourth-estate journalism will do okay (we hope), but the largest ad dollars growth will go to those "software plus services" providers that can give the advertisers the best on-target and metrics-based match-up between buyers and sellers. And then the IT companies buy the media companies, and then they buy the telecos and cable and mobile providers. Nice and tidy. On stop shopping to get inside of your head/wallet.

Who to blame? No one. It's inevitable. Government regulators could scarcely keep up, even if they will and budgets existed. If Google and Microsoft don't do it someone else will. Mark Cuban thinks those alternatives could well be the local broadband providers, and he's right ... but only for a time. Once the total online ad monopoly kicks in, it will be a digital Standard Oil on steroids with no Sherman Antitrust Act.

Is Google the white knight and Microsoft the evil empire? Nope. Just like in any good vs evil saga (Star Wars?) both sides need each other desperately. For the better that Google does in making ad-based online applications and services work acceptably, the easier it is for Microsoft to inject that model into its current stable of software, and present it as ... services.

And the more successful (could they be any more successful?) that Microsoft is at providing PC applications and services locally, online or both, the easier it is for Google to make its SaaS alternatives look good enough. These two massively and globally influential companies will ratchet each other up to the level of the modern-day ballpark. It's not either-or, it's both Microsoft and Google propelling the shifts in the market to ad-based everything online, including your business applications, including your high school yearbook.

We are all just going along for the ride. For many of us, we think we get the functional services cheaply because the ads pay for the "software plus services." But when was the last time you saw the price of admission tickets to a ball game fall as they hoisted yet another billboard up over left field?

It won't be ad-based revenue or subscription. No, it will be ad-based revenue and subscription. Has to be. We have no choice.

SOA adds broth to technology acronym soup

SOA consultant Todd Biske, who did a great job on a panel I was honored to moderate earlier this week, has some good thoughts on the definitions and roles of IT categories and SOA.

His blog posting on "acronym soup" is worth a read.

And thanks to the other members of "The Future of SOA" panel at The Open Group conference -- Tony Baer, Beth Gold-Bernstein and Eric Knorr -- for their excellent contributions.

We'll make the discussion available as a BriefingsDirect podcast and transcript. I'll blog on it here when it's up.

Red Hat takes SOA modeling tool concept to open source development

In an attempt to add grease to the skids of SOA adoption, Red Hat has agreed to take a patented concept for a services modeling approach and usher it through an open source community development process before eventually adding it to the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.

Red Hat announced today that SOA expert and author Thomas Erl's concept for a services modeling and analysis tool will form the basis for a new JBoss.org project, the results of which will become a LGPL product that will be then be supported under the JBoss SOA offerings.

The tool-in-progress is designed to fill a gap in the market for a top-down, platform-agnostic way for non-developers to assess a business process and determine the required services that would comprise the process within a SOA environment. Erl said the tool will be a first in terms of its utility.

The way in which the tool incubates and arrives may also be unique. I'm assuming that Erl was compensated in some way by Red Hat for his intellectual property in defining the tool. And Red Hat will guide the community development process, and reap the rewards of a commercial open source model when it charges for subscription support and training for the tool and its associated SOA platform.

Perhaps more of us should be patenting ideas for software products and services, and then pitching them to Red Hat. I've always liked the idea of a cottage industry for enterprise software.

Anyway, the modeling tool as defined to date targets technical analysts so they can create a business-centric design of services, or containers of services, that combine to provide a business process or processes. The tool helps conceptualize and refine an inventory or blueprint of services, to then set the stage for the actual creation or acquisition of the requisite services, explained Erl. Managing multiple inventories also becomes easier via the tool's design.

Erl hopes the tool fosters better collaboration between analysts and SOA architects. It should help coordinate their group planning for services development and to provide a framework for iterative or Agile back-and-forth services creation with an end business process in mind.

The goal is to address the needs in the market today, to get the ball rolling on modeling for SOA, and also to be easily extensible to work within other SOA modeling initiatives -- such as UML-based work by OMG and others -- as they mature.

Community development may also create interfaces or plug ins for the service inventories to map to UDDI generally, as well as lead to specific connectors to registries and repositories.

Erl also published today a new book, "SOA: Principles of Service Design," which better fleshes out his concepts and methods on service engineering.

HP's Opsware buy highlights burgeoning role of management

I'm sitting at an engaging Open Group conference on SOA and its deep impact across IT and enterprises. A common theme, not surprisingly, is the issue of control ... some of the biggest fears about SOA is that it may be too good, too inclusive -- and may consequently spin out of control.

Managing complexity is at the heart of making SOA successful, but it's a double-edged sword. SOA can both slay and spawn complexity. Who wants to swap out integration complexity for services-driven operational and governance complexity?

Sure, SOA can bring more agility to the business processes that span companies, industries and commercial relationships. But at what cost if it's done poorly? If we gain agility but suffer chaos, breakdowns, lack of control and even more higher-abstraction complexity -- you'll see closed and brittle silos of IT assets remain very popular.

At the same time that SOA needs to be controlled well to be productive, we're seeing massive re-centralization of IT resources -- especially hardware, storage and networking infrastructure. Again, there's a tension here between efficiency and the dangers of having all your eggs in one basket. Going from nine datacenters to two makes a lot of sense, unless one of the two is out of control.

It seems to me that HP is evolving and inserting itself into the role of arbiter between control and creativity on many essential levels. We saw this in the Mercury acquisition last year, and we're seeing a affirmation of this role for HP in today's Opsware announcement.

IBM wants to help you keep your company special. HP, it seems, wants to let you know how to keep it stable.

The largest enterprises will thrive or stumble on their ability to gain agility and creativity, along with operational efficiency. They must go hand-in-hand. But true management comes with holistic control -- that which spans operational and systems management, heterogeneous datacenters management, services governance, IT governance -- and ultimately business governance. There needs to be semantic continuity to how all these management layers relate, and that usually means standards.

I was recently quoted in an article on IT and SOA management, and I believe that the distinctions between layers of management need bridging via standards and expertise.

This type of widely and deeply inclusive management and control has been missing in the IT industry. HP is demonstrating by its organic and acquisitions growth that this will be one of the essential pillars of functionality it will provide for the IT infrastructures of the future. Vigorous commercial competition and aggressive open communities involvement will be essential for making IT and automated business management conceptually and practically coordinated.

I hope we see more open source and community-based initiatives from HP to augment and accelerate its recent acquisitions activities. Opsware will be a powerful asset for HP for many years to come.

Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.