Almost all our customers are asking for the ability to migrate to Windows 7 when adopting desktop virtualization

Atul Ahuja, Director – Microsoft Alliance & Strategic Sales, Citrix, in an interview with Harshal Kallyanpur, talks about why many Indian organisations still running on Windows XP, are migrating to  Windows 7 with desktop virtualization.

It has been over a year since Windows 7 has been available in India. Yet, many organisations are not migrating from XP to Windows 7 for their desktops. What challenges do you see them facing at the desktop side that is keeping them from making the move?

Most enterprises today have thick clients or PC desktops that they have been using since the last few years. Some of their laptops are still running on Windows XP. Even after buying new desktops or laptops pre-loaded with Windows 7, they are downgrading the Operating System (OS) to Windows XP.

Even though the CIO wants the organisation to move to Windows 7 based systems, their enterprise application stack prevents them from doing so. Many of these applications were written over 10 years ago, with a view to run them on Windows XP based desktops. There are many enterprises even today which have older versions of proprietary software such SAP as being accessed on these desktops because it is serving their business requirements adequately.

The application interfaces were written for end-user access, in a way that it ties them to the operating system, therefore making it difficult for them to move without making changes to the code. And making changes to code is a tedious task and could have an impact on the organisation due its dependency on the application for running the business.

Therefore, several organisations are refraining from moving to newer versions of the operating system.

Also, a lot of organisations do not have the CAPEX to invest in refreshing all their desktop hardware and upgrade to Windows 7 based systems. Therefore they are choosing to run with older systems as long as the hardware and OS are supported.

However, an application built to run, for instance, via the Internet Explorer 6 or an older browser, will have trouble running on the newer versions of the browser. They will have to upgrade to a higher browser to run the application.
Furthermore, Windows XP as an operating system, was designed keeping in mind the then current demands of desktop users. The usage pattern of desktops back then was very different from what it is today. While the platform has been running successfully for the last 12 or 13 odd years, the enterprise today would end up spending a considerable amount of time and effort managing and securing desktops running on XP. Also the OS will soon start to limit the choice of applications that organisations would be to run on the system, and some of this has already started to happen.

They can continue to run on Windows XP, upto April 2014, when Microsoft stops supporting the OS, and till the hardware manufacturers continue to provide drivers for their respective hardware. Eventually they too, would stop releasing new updates to drivers for older systems.

How do you propose desktop virtualization as a solution to these issues?

The primary problem lies in the fact that these applications are tied to the operating system. At the base level, Windows XP and Windows 7 are different operating systems. This means that the organisation may have to go through considerable code changes to the applications to make them run efficiently on the new OS. Also, newer operating systems demand a different hardware configuration and therefore it becomes necessary to check if the application will run without any issues on the new hardware.

On the other hand, the task of desktop migration itself is a tedious one and time consuming. Even if a user’s desktop environment is moved to a new machine running the same OS, bringing it to the same state, and keeping the look and feel the same after migrating the user‘s applications and data is very difficult.

Desktop virtualization decouples the OS from the hardware, the applications from the OS and ties it to the user. It creates a user profile that includes the type of OS and the applications he uses along with his data.

The user’s desktop can then be delivered to him dynamically on a variety of computing devices such as a thin client, or a thick client like a old desktop converted to a dumb terminal. With desktop virtualization, the choice of end-point devices increases.

As the applications and data are linked to the user, he can be seamlessly moved from a Windows XP to a Windows 7-based system and the applications can still be accessed from within the new OS through virtualization, will all his previous folders and data intact and linked to his profile.

Furthermore, a lot of applications designed for access through IE6 do not run on IE7. Using a combination of desktop and application virtualization, these applications can be delivered in other environments such as Windows 7, or for that matter even non-Windows operating systems.
While the enterprise can seamlessly move from Windows XP to a newer version of Windows, or any other OS of its choice, desktop virtualization frees the IT department from maintenance activities such as updating through Service Packs or patching for every machine.

We recently acquired AppDNA which offers readiness testing for applications for operating systems such as Windows 7. The tool can tell the readiness of application to move to Windows 7, barying from completely ready, needs patching, or cannot move at all. AppDNA is useful for customers who are looking to move a number of applications to Windows 7 environment. Some organisations still using older versions of certain software can also test the Windows 7 readiness of these solutions using the tool.

How do you see organisations in India leveraging desktop virtualization to migrate to Windows 7?
A lof of our customers in India started out with desktop virtualization with a different business driver for it. For some, it was about bringing down the cost of managing and maintaining end-user desktops, while for others, it was about ensuring better security at the desktop level.

For example, today, while it may seem that it would be cheaper to get resources in Tier 2 or Tier 3 cities to manage the infrastructure, but the time, effort and cost spent in management is far more as a TCO from a manageability point of view. However, HDFC Bank, one of our customers, has been able to venture into Tier 2 or Tier 3 cities, and set up an infrastructure faster and manage it in a cost-effective manner, leveraging on desktop virtualization.

There are customers on the other hand, who are sticking to older desktops and using them as dumb clients for desktop virtualization. These customers do not have the necessary CAPEX for a hardware refresh. Then there are those who are going with desktop virtualization because they want a single desktop experience across multiple devices especially for their mobile and remote work force.

The larger population of desktop users in an enterprise, consists of users which can be described as a task worker. For instance an employee stationed in a bank, or on a shop floor in manufacturing company would be carrying out three or four types of transactions on a daily basis. As a shop floor worker, he might be punching an invoice or punching a transaction in the core banking system as a bank worker.

The task worker, accesses the same basic set of enterprise applications on a daily basis for most of the time. In the remaining time, he could be using his desktop for Internet access  or e-mail. Most of the desktop migration issues are seen at the task worker level where the users have been using the same old desktop for a long time, since applications were written for that environment. Here, we are  seeing customers leveraging on desktop virtualization to migrate to Windows 7.

Almost every customer of ours, who has chosen to migrate to desktop virtualization because of  his respective business drivers is asking for the ability to migrate to Windows 7 when adopting desktop virtualization.

We already have customers from the BPO, Manufacturing, BFSI, IT/ITeS and media, looking at migrating or having already migrated to Windows 7, via desktop virtualization. To put it in perspective, if an organisation with 10,000 desktops, has adopted  desktop virtualization for 4000 of them, Windows XP has been retired successfully for all of these 4000 machines.

Microsoft has recently released Windows 8, which promises a similar experience on both touch-based and non-touch based PCs. Some of  your customers might want to migrate to Windows 8. Your take on this.

While we see Windows 8 getting adopted, we think a lot of enterprises would be initially focused on moving from XP to Windows 7. Given the touch-based interface requirements and that the ecosystem around the OS is still growing, most of the enterprises are today looking at migrating to Windows 7 first.

A lot of applications that were written earlier were designed for non-touch-based devices such as desktops and laptops. Therfore enterprises would largely look at migrating to a similar OS environment. However, there would be a set of users who would have touch-based devices such as tablet PCs and would want to access their desktop on these devices. Furthermore, remote desktop users, especially traveling employees could end up accessing their enterprise desktop on a device that is outside the company network, such as desktop in an Internet cafe in a hotel.

With Citrix Receiver, we tie the user’s desktop and the OS to his profile such that,  it is available to him for consumption irrespective of the end-user device.

On the other hand, Microsoft with Windows 8, is also ensuring that the touch interface will support all equivalent key strokes of the PC hardware, on a touch-based device. And therefore, the same Windows 8 desktop image can be delivered on different devices such as a PC or a laptop or a touch-screen tablet PC.