Client Virtualization Stage 2 - Early Steps

Towards the end of Client Virtualization Stage 1, a lot of things happened.. and these were calling in for an innovations.. the are listed below..

- Many Government Departments were seriously looking at Alternate Computing platforms..

- Most of the Government Departments were looking at going ahead with Opensource

- ITES / BPO market in India was picking up in India and new companies were seriously entering the business..

- Government Funded Education Programs where being more streamlined (SSA / ICT)..

Around this time, i was having a challenge on convincing the R&D team (HCL) and coming out with an innovative Linux Image and solutions.. This was happening between years 2005 and 2006. In this period there were no major break for the client virtualization solutions..

I joined HP around 2006. This was a total new environment there.. R&D is not located in India.. and no customization can be done.. The device was basically designed for SBC solutions.. that was time HP started focusing on the Client virtualization business..

Every challenge opens up a new opportunity.. For an Linux client i had the below basic frame work in Mind and was looking at the opportunity to make this a live..

Basic Frame work for Linux Thinclient:

- Full Fledged Browser

- Open office

- Adobe Reader

- Photo File viewer

- Basic Movie Player

The idea is, if we have these basic things then we can eliminate the requirement for a central server and the total solution will become cost effective..The biggest challenge is to accommodate all this with in a 256 MB Flash memory.. (This whole size should be less than 100 MB)..

At that point of time, Red Hat India Development center was looking at focusing on the Embedded development and Mr. Satish was leading the team there.. we had a meeting with the team and one Mr. Ashok was the project engineer dedicated for this project. He was very innovative and was willing to accept the challenge..

Around that Mr. Suresh Kumar (Then Sales Manager - Education Vertical - Bangalore) has come out with a requirement from a college. The college wanted to set up a browsing center for their students. They wanted to have 100 nodes for this purpose. All the other vendors were there with Regular SBC solution.. The customer was reluctant because of two reasons..

- The cost of SBC solution was high

- Redundancy option - If one server is down then 50 users will not be able to work..

Along with Suresh we had a detailed discussion with the customer, then we suggested the customer that we will give the basic requirements on the Embedded OS only (Open office, browser, Zip file viewer, Adobe reader, Flash player etc.). Customer liked the concept as this eliminated the requirement of the server at the location.. But wanted to have the demo immediately..

We worked with Red Hat Bangalore team and got the demo set up ready in Flat two days time.. This was the worlds first embedded Linux OS with all built in.. slowly this has became a main stream in the market..

This also opened up a all new market.. where we can target the customers who earlier were not looking at Client virtualization because of the over all costing..(Servers / storage etc.) and the redundancy part..

This small step and an innovation has opened up a Stage 2 in a big way..

More to come..