Business Desktops

Last year alone The European Patent Office (EPO) granted over 54,000 patents, with many of those originating with applications filed online. These figures show how important issues, such as eGovernment, are critical to increasing efficiency and customer experience for the Public Sector. I am delighted to say that the EPO is working with Dell to accomplish what many Public Sector organisations desire -- the ability to provide faster and smoother services to the community and improve employee productivity across multiple offices. This is a great best practice example from the EPO.

We are really excited to be taking this project on board as they have made the decision to simplify their IT infrastructure for the benefit of their employees, the environment and European citizens. There are three main areas that other organisations can learn from.

Firstly, I think it is important to highlight that the EPO, like many public sector IT departments are forced to accomplish a lot with only limited budget and so are forced to reduce the complexity of their IT infrastructures, reduce IT costs, and increase the efficiency of the organization.

Secondly, improved productivity is imperative as public business is facing entirely new challenges worldwide due to globalization and demography.

And thirdly, the problem of IT complexity also affects the public sector. Homogeneous IT landscapes have been more the exception than the rule here. After 20 years of computing, vast hardware and software zoos have accumulated in organizations, which can negatively affect administration and accountability. Working with Dell, the EPO will benefit from Dell’s Simplify and Save ethos, which is a great way to achieve the productivity  and simplicity necessary to pull through these new challenges and become more productive, more effective and ultimately, more successful.

To help manage their IT infrastructure better, Dell will provide Managed Desktop Services for the EPO’s installed base of approximately 9,500 desktops, laptops and personal printers. Dell will be replacing existing PCs with Dell OptiPlex 755 desktops and over 1,000 Dell Latitude E-Series notebooks will be deployed at the EPO’s offices in Munich, Berlin, Vienna and The Hague by the end of this year. The EPO will also benefit from Dell's Custom Factory Integration (CFI) service to suit the EPO’s exact requirements and all new machines will also have the latest Energy Smart configurations and power management settings.

The Custom Factory Integration will result in significant time savings in delivering and deploying new equipment and the Energy Smart configurations will reduce noise and energy consumption levels.  As part of its green IT strategy, Dell will recycle the EPO’s old computers and has provided the EPO with a small tree as a symbol of its promise to plant a tree for every Dell system deployed to the EPO. Not only will this help them meet their own environmental goals and guidelines easily, the deal will also help the EPO achieve its main goal of improving the level of service it provides to European citizens with quality and efficiency.

As server virtualization gains traction in the data center, a new form of virtualization is starting to make headway on the desktop: client virtualization. At Dell, we use the term Dell Flexible Computing to refer to our family of desktop virtualization solutions. The big idea behind all of them is that they can simplify day-to-day client management tasks such as the deployment, patching, and migration of images, applications, and data. They can also simplify tasks related to security, regulatory compliance, and recovery, which are becoming more and more complicated, as workers employ more and more different client devices to remotely access the network.

Because Dell Flexible Computing simplifies desktop operations, it reduces costs. For example, the Dell Virtual Remote Desktop solution can cut those costs by an average of 40 percent, and pay for itself within six months.

We’ve also simplified the process of learning about this exciting new technology. For starters, visit our Inside IT blog to view a five-part education series for beginners. Or, for more detail, check out the recent article in ”Flexible Computing: Advancing End-User Productivity with Centralized Control” in the November issue of Dell Power Solutions.

You've made it to part five of Juan Vega's final video overview of flexible computing or client virtualization for dummies. You never were literally a 'dummy' but now you (and I) are much smarter than when we started this series.

In this video, Juan provides a brief overview of Dell's Dedicated Remote Workstation (DRW) solution, a high-performance computing solution designed for graphics-intensive and compute-intensive environments. A benefit of the DRW solution is that all the control and manageability aspects of the other flex solutions are maintained but now the user is given advanced levels of graphics applications and workstation-class performance.

If you missed the first four parts of this flex computing overview, take a look at part one, part two, part three (my personal favorite ) and part four.

Let me know if you this educational video series was helpful to you or if you have other suggestions of what you'd like to see.

This afternoon, Juan Vega gives us a white-board overview of Dell's Virtual Remote Desktop (VRD) solution as part of the company's Flexible Computing and client virtualization strategy. With many similarities to ODDS, VRD can be stretched across long distances for wide area network (WAN) environments, making it an ideal solution for medical, healthcare or educational environments.

If you missed the first three parts of this flex computing overview, take a look at part one, part two and part three.

Enjoy.

In this the third of a five-part vlog series on client virtualization or flexible computing, Juan Vega outlines for us the concept of On-Demand Desktop Streaming (ODDS), one of three flex computing solutions from Dell. ODDS isolates storage away from the client machine, giving your organization's IT department complete control over the data. It also centralizes all the user data in a secure environment, providing centralized management of the data.

If you missed the first two parts of this flex computing overview, take a look at part one and part two.

Enjoy.