According to Point to Point, the ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) culture, coupled with the advancements in cloud and virtualisation technologies, has increased the complexity of desktop environments making it more difficult for customers to select the right solution to fit their current and future requirements.
Drawing on 20 years’ experience of delivering desktop transformation solutions, Point to Point suggests companies are potentially wasting thousands of pounds by rushing into projects without conducting full tests of their IT environments. Recent industry research shows that only 20-40 per cent of applications are ready for Windows 7 and that 60-80 per cent of a typical application portfolio will need some remediation to meet the required deployment standards. A further five per cent of applications have a specific problem that needs to be addressed by the software vendor or programmer and some applications will just never run in a certain environment.
This is the sort of information companies need to consider before embarking on a project, rather than getting a nasty surprise half way through, says Point to Point. Point to Point asserts that many companies are failing to recognise the trigger points in the IT infrastructure, such as Users and Applications, which can render a project redundant due to poor compatibility. As a result, many projects are falling by the wayside half-way to completion, forcing organisations to backtrack on often expensive migrations.
Jon Hunt, Business Development Director for Point to Point explains: “Selecting a virtualisation and desktop solution used to be fairly simple, but this is no longer the case. Desktop and application virtualisation is now a strategic business issue, not just a matter for the IT department. The introduction of Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), Cloud, open source and the consumerisation of IT has introduced a number of new variants into the desktop environment, creating a multitude of compatibility issues.
There has also been an increase in the technology options available, meaning there are now many different ways to achieve the same result. This is why we set up our Strategic Formation Services (SFS) division in 2008 to help customers to better understand their IT environments. Our SFS approach is based on years of experience of how certain technologies react in the real-world environment, using our own IP, rather than relying on vendors sometimes overly optimistic assertions. This puts us in a strong position to provide impartial advice on what route will best suit a client’s desktop environment.”