The more you can see, the more you can do. I used to work in front of two 17″ monitors; the gap between the screens where the bezel interrupted the view just vanished from my vision and all I saw was a lot of Web pages, Word documents, spreadsheets and emails. A couple of years back, I damaged my ankle and couldn’t comfortably sit at a desk for several months and even when I could, I found I preferred working in a big recliner chair. A 17″ laptop was ideal but mostly I work on 12″ or 12.1″ widescreen notebooks - currently it’s an HP 2710p because it has such excellent battery life. My elderly Athlon had started crashing every 20 minutes with a hardware failure and besides, I didn’t want to go back to XP, so I put up with the smaller, single screen. Occasionally I’ve tried two laptops side by side - usually when I was reviewing one of them - but the switch from keyboard to keyboard is very disruptive.
I’d seen the DisplayLink technology before but it was seeing the wireless USB setup at CES this year that gave me the inspiration. If I could link my notebook to my two 17″ screens by wireless USB I could easily go back to twin screens without worrying about dealing with yet another cable. So we started juggling the office, to put my chair closer to Simon’s desk and with a flat surface where monitors could stand. This involved replacing a wall-mounted bookcase that would have tapped me on the head and I spent a happy Easter weekend decoupaging a pair of wooden Ikea drawers to put the monitors at comfortable eye height (they’d sat by an open window during one rainy summer and got very grimy).

Today we started hooking things up. Turns out two screens will really need some kind of wall-mount, hopefully on an extending bracket at an angle.I don’t have the wireless USB connection just yet so I’ll save DisplayLink for when I get the wall-mount and want two external screens and put up with a VGA cable for now. I’ve already used a strip of Velcro to mate the power and Ethernet cables so one more isn’t much more unwieldy.

For now, there’s one monitor perched on my right. This isn’t the same as screens side by side - but it’s ideal for parking a PowerPoint I plan to refer to or a Webex meeting I’m taking notes on. It came in very handy juggling hotel details and conference schedules for a trip, and then for having the details of last-minute cash ISA deals where I wouldn’t get distracted by them while I was on the phone talking about the next version of Windows Mobile. I can put my inbox over there and have messages and documents I’m writing in front of me. 

And Vista (or the Intel graphics driver or most probably the combination of the two) does a really good job of handling applications on multiple windows  - far better than XP and my old Matrox card. With the Matrox card, I had one VGA port and one DVI port with a VGA adapter in. Absolutely fine  - except that I could only watch video on the left screen; video streams on the right screen were black boxes.  And Windows extended my desktop onto the second screen and pretended I had one huge monitor.  That meant maximising a window painted it across both screens and dialog boxes popped up in the ‘middle’ of the extended screen - cut in half between the two displays and very hard to absorb.

Now, applications maximise to fill the screen they’re on to start with and dialogs stay on the screen they belong with.  If I close an application, unplug the laptop and go out, come back to the office and open the same application - the window opens at the same size and on the same monitor as the last time.

Internet Explorer still has a bad habit of pushing new windows onto the other screen - it’s always wanted to sprawl over the whole desktop like a cat on a Sunday newspaper - but nine times out of ten, if a page opens a new window it’s something I want to work on straight away anyway or I would have forced it into a new tab. I shall update the release candidate of SP1 to the release version of SP1 soon and then I can install the beta of IE 8 and see if that’s any more polite.

I’ve only had a second monitor for about four hours and I’ve got twice as much tinkering and timewasting done as usual. Now I shall settle down to some real work and although I won’t get twice as much done, I’m certainly expecting the extra real estate to make a real difference.
-Mary

With Firefox 3 around the corner, and IE 8 in beta, perhaps its time to call this round of browser wars over before they’ve begun. Adobe’s put a line in the sand today with the beta of Photoshop Express, and there’s no way a pure HTML/CSS/JavaScript browser can ever cross it - no matter how much of ACID3 it can render.

Why?

Microsoft and Adobe are pushing innovative web application development outside the browser into cross-platform runtimes that deliver everything that Java promised. HTML is obsolete, and all we really need is the <object> tag.

One of the big announcements at Microsoft’s web development conference Mix08 was the public beta of Silverlight 2. It’s another salvo in the developing rivalry between Microsoft and Adobe. Both companies are treading on the same path as they struggle to find direction in the developing software as a service world. Adobe’s made its latest step today, with a Flash-based in-browser version of Photoshop built using its Flex platform. Both companies are targeting developers with their rich internet applications strategies, offering platforms for next generation web applications that go beyond the limitations of HTML and web browsers.

Silverlight 2 is Microsoft’s first cut at a high-performance in-browser rich internet application platform. Flash may well perform well if you’re using the Flash 9 player, but noit everyone writes well-architected Flex applications, and the Flash/Flex designer/developer dichotomy is a tricky one to deal with. Not everyone can write an application like Photoshop Express, and the capabilities of Flash are being lost in a morass of advertising animations that mean a lot of influential users block Flash from their browsers completely…

Microsoft is watching Adobe carefully, and it’s trying not to make the same mistakes. While Silverlight is designed to be used by advertisers (and comes with plug-ins suitable for most analytics platforms), it’s also developer friendly. Install Silverlight 2 and the Silverlight 2 SDK and you’ve suddenly got a tool that lets you write C# code that runs at desktop speeds inside a browser - and on Macs as well as Windows boxes. There’s no point in codeing for a host of incompatible browsers if you can target a plug-in that’ll work across a sizeable set of your target userbase.

You’re going to need to write code if you’re planning on using Silverlight in anger. Deep Zoom, one of the Mix 08 Silverlight announcments, may only take a line of code to implement in your XAML - but you’ll need a lot more in the associated code to actually work with browser, mouse and keyboard to actually handle the zooming… Microsoft is a developer-focused business, and even though its attempting to redress this with its Expression family of tools, you’re going to need Visual Studio to get the most out of Silverlight.

Photoshop Express is a good idea - and a powerful tool. Could you build it in Silverlight as well as Flash/Flex? The answer’s quite simple: Yes. It’d probably run faster too, as Silverlight has a threading model that’s not there in the current generation of the Flash player. This time next year, well, who’s to say. Flash 10 will have probably changed the game yet again. One things certain: you couldn’t build it in HTML.

There’s something for everyone in the competing RIA platforms. That’s a good thing, as it’ll mean better user experiences for everyone - and a step back from the current round of browser wars. Meanwhile Microsoft and Adobe wil take competition outside the browser and into the development platform. The next step, well that’s most likely to happen where it’s needed most - server side.

–Simon

Way back when consumer digital maps were new, I went in to see the Dorling Kindersley World Atlas on DVD. We were looking at the California map and I wanted to see where the Apple headquarters were. I said ‘Cupertino’ and the helpful PR said ‘OK but I thought we could finish the demo and then have lunch’. We looked at each other blankly for a little while; they’d heard a rather curt ‘cup of tea now!’ rather than a place name. Even if you know you’re talking about location, there’s room for error. When you put San Jose into Dopplr, you get 25 places, none of them in California.

Fire Eagle - Yahoo’s new location service, which will act as a universal broker between location services like the Loopt system Google Maps uses on mobile phones and services like Dopplr - is trying to be smarter about identifying what you type. It knows that Grand Canyon is a place. And if my GPS has sent one location and I’m typing another in on the Web, it doesn’t just take the latest update.

It knows that my GPS co-ordinates in Campbell are actually inside the better-known San Jose area, so it can pick the most accurate designation. But if the last place my GPS knew I was before the batteries ran out was 60 miles away in Southern San Francisco, Fire Eagle will say I’ve moved on.

As a geek, I’m delighted. I’ll have much more chance of having an interesting conversation if a friend can see I’m not just in California but in San Francisco, not just in San Francisco but at the Moscone Center, not just at Moscone but leaving the press room and heading for the West Hall. I want the friend travelling from New Zealand for the Web 2.0 conference to know exactly where I am. I want my editor to know pretty well where I am, although if I’m interviewing a source in the bar rather than writing up copy in the press room I might want a fudge factor of 50 feet. My sister wants to know which state and maybe which city I’ll be in. The PR person trying to reach me probably only needs to know which timezone I’m in.

But do I want every Facebook user - including the burglar who’s spotted we look at a lot of new smartphones - to even know I’m out of the office? My personal blog is more likely to have a photo of the drawer unit I decoupaged at the weekend than of the drawer unit in place, with two monitors and a scattering of mobiles on it, for much the same reason; or if it has the more revealing image, I’ll be limiting it to ‘friends and family’ via settings on Flickr and LiveJournal.

Actually, of course, I’ll have to do both, as the two sets of identities don’t match up. If LiveJournal users annoyed at the way the new Russian owners of the site have handled introducing adverts on all free accounts migrate to other services, it will be even harder to include the people I want to publish to, because the only cross-site identity that’s really in use is OpenID and it’s not ready for primetime.

For one thing it’s not supported by every site (or even a large proportion of them), and there’s a mix of support for the older, less secure OpenID 1.1 and the newer, stricter OpenID 2. And even with the newer, stricter OpenID 2, OpenID isn’t secure; it’s vulnerable to attacks from either end of the connection, and the middle - that’s because it’s little more than a simple, lightweight way of saying ‘that URL over there? It’s me, that is’.

It doesn’t say what the URL you’re pointing at is, only that it’s some URL that supports OpenID. Mary.WeHackYouForMoney.com is a valid OpenID (well, it would be if I paused to register the domain and set up the OpenID code).

Open ID is good for the simplest of single sign-on systems (for more complex enterprise SSO, take note that IBM just bought Encentuate). It lets me say, without an API, that the me on Facebook is the me on Flickr, LiveJournal, LinkedIn and so on (because I have to tell each site to accept the OpenID request from the next one, so I must have the username and password to get into each previous account).

Anil Dash of Six Apart (former owners of LiveJournal) mentioned to me at Etech 08 that several large customers (for values of large enough to run Oracle)  are using Open ID for employees and partners so they can prove they work for the company in online discussions. Proving identity is a nice idea; but Open ID just proves they have access to a domain that sounds about right. To have an Internet-wide identity system that will let me choose friends  across a mix of sites and services, there’s going to have to be something a little stricter, like SAML, WS-Federation.

Identity systems like Higgins, Bandit and Microsoft CardSpace could all work together to let me pick an information card with the information I want to assert about myself and an identity provider I want to have back it up. Then you’d know that Experian says I’m on the electoral role and IT Pro says I’m a writer here - and when you choose to let me see where you are in the world you’d know who you were showing your itinerary to.

And if you’re still expecting CardSpace to make the same mistakes as Passport and pass your details on from every site using it to Microsoft… About the same time IBM bought Encentuate, Microsoft bought Credentica; not so much for the UProve software as for the maths behind it. This is a provable protocol that lets you outsource information provision without letting the information provided out of your system. Instead of boning up on CardSpace and SAML, you could say to your usual IT consultancy ‘bill me for a CardSpace system that proves my employees work here’. The information provider would assert that your CTO was your CTO, but it would never get his name to pester for a new contract. The information provider wouldn’t see my travel dates or my list of who I count as a friend. Identity, location - and a bit of privacy.

Yesterday Sir Arthur C. Clarke died, on the far side of the world, a long way from the Somerset coast where he first dreamed of the stars.

We may think of him as the man behind the books and the films, as the bone spinning in the air shifts into a spaceship orbiting the earth, but it’s his ideas that have help shape our modern world - both from the engineers he inspired by his stories, and from his own scientific writings and papers.

It’s not many people who have a whole ring around the world named after them. The Clarke Orbit has become shorthand for geostationary orbit, home of the myriad communication satellites that bind our world together. It was his paper in Wireless World, back in 1945, that first suggested a network of satellites that could cover the world from an orbit that kept pace with the spinning globe below. He probably didn’t imagine that there’d be so many, or that there’d be so much traffic passing through them.

It’s these satellites that started the development of the globe spanning network we’ve come to know as the Internet, revolutionising the world. Satellite phones bring the most isolated village to your door, while TV images show us the faces our neighbours. Without communication satellites there’d have been no LiveAid - at least until after film and video of famine had spent weeks being trekked out of isolated refugee camps. The world has become a smaller place, but it’s also become a closer one.

Satellites aren’t Clarke’s only contribution to the world. During the Second World War he was one of the team of engineers that developed radio-beam controlled landing techniques. If you’ve been on an airliner landing at night - or in fog - you’ve benefited from his work (which he wrote about in his book Glide Path). He also was one of the first to suggest that satellites could be used to deliver information that could be used to improve weather forecasts, spotting weather hundreds of miles out to sea.

Clarke was an early user of email, and he published a book in 1984 of his email collaboration with Peter Hyams on the film of 2010, a fascinating document of the early days of a technology we now take for granted. Email and handhelds were a recurring feature of his novels (especially later works like Imperial Earth), and he regularly explored the theme of a highly connected communicating society - expressing the hope that it would finally bring down the barriers between people and nations.

Engineers were often the heroes of his stories, along with auditors and administrators. His was fiction for the makers and the doers, for the people who took the visions of his stories and started to build a better future. While SpaceShip One and the X-Prize owe a lot to US science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, it’s Clarke who inspired work on space elevators and on solar sails - efforts he hoped would be his lasting gift to the world.

I’m one of those who were inspired by his books. I started young, with his early works (which were what we’d now label Young Adult) and with his short fiction. I wrote my degree dissertation on communication satellites, and spent the first few years of my life working as an electronics engineer - first on radar systems, and then on the electromagnetic launch technologies he explored in stories like Earthlight. I was privileged to meet him once, in 1992 on what was one of his last visits to the UK, in his home town of Minehead.

Vale Sir Arthur.

We spent some of Friday powering up and down the 101, meeting folk at both Serena and Yahoo!.

There was a common theme to the meetings - the power of open APIs to power the next generation of consumer and business applications. It’s well documented, discoverable, APIs let us build the complex mashups of services and processes.

Discoverable is the key word. We need to be able to automate API access in our development tools, whether they’re GUIs like Serena’s new business mash-up tool, or whether they’re JavaScript code in my web development tool of choice, Aptana.

Yahoo! has been working on API-level tooling for sometime now, and a recurring theme of our lunch conversation was summed up in a question from a developer evangelist: “What APIs can we offer you next?” It was a question that made me think, as Yahoo!’s APIs have been at the heart of the web applications I’ve been writing recently. It’s Yahoo! Local Search that geocodes my postcodes for me, and Yahoo! Pipes that converts any web service into a simple JSON operator I can use in JavaScript to build cross-service mashups that down fall foul of the browser security model.

The latest tool to come out of Yahoo!’s research teams is Fire Eagle, a universal location broker. Tell Fire Eagle where you are, and you can share your location with applications that you’ve given access rights. The Fire Eagle API is designed to handle location information (along with the details of the providing service, so you know how accurate the information is), and authentication (making sure the right person gets the right level of detail).

APIs like these are a key to delivering on two key visions: cloud computing and SOA. When you’re using Fire Eagl, you’re subscribing to a service, either as an information provider or an information consumer. You’re also taking advantage of the infrastructure Yahoo!’s built, using compute resources in the cloud to manage your individual location information.

Analyst James Governor came up with an interesting list of signs that something isn’t cloud computing. At number 5 on the list was this: If there is no API… its not a cloud.

I can’t disagree with that, at all.

–Simon

When we landed in Los Angeles this trip, I was relieved and disappointed at the same time. We’d been expecting the new ten-finger sensors instead of the left-index-right-index-photograph dance you currently do, but they weren’t installed yet. I’m keen to see these in action, and I don’t expect to be in Boston, Dulles or Atlanta any time soon (they’ll be in all US airports by the end of the year). The current scanners are optical - rather like a bar code scanner in a supermarket. That’s a little slow and could be fooled by a fake finger (unlikely as the TSA agent would spot it).

Scanning ten fingers is good for security - more chances of a match with fingerprints the FBI has found at crime scenes where you’re as likely to get a thumb print as anything else. And if it’s not going to take five times as long, it must be using an active technology like the AuthenTec scanner in my HP 2710p notebook - and I want to see how well it works in a heavy duty situation.

I like the HP scanner because I don’t have to remember passwords any more, so I can make them longer and harder to break. I wish HP would write a driver to let me use it for scrolling and I can’t wait until the promised update compensates for the way the screen moves a little as I scan my finger so I don’t have to brace it with my other hand any more. This is much more about convenience than security, and I think my fingerprints are safe enough in my PC. I’m less happy about government use of biometrics, because the government has a terrible record on data security and a dubious one on protecting privacy.

Motorola didn’t reassure me after they did a pilot for biometric visas for the UK, Austria, Luxembourg, Portugal and Spain and the UK. “From the pilots we’ve been involved with, it’s clear that the biggest challenge is around working practices,” says Gillian Ormiston, senior solutions consultant for Biometric Identity Management and Security Solutions at Motorola. The biometrics worked fine - but switching from a paper visa process to tapping it all in on computer wasn’t always as smooth, and that’s where security problems - or just mistakes - can happen.

A friend of ours is cabin crew with a major UK airline and that meant he ended up in the pilot for the US visa biometrics some years ago. He and a colleague were scanned, photographed and welcomed to America. Next week he was back at the same airport, but his fingerprints didn’t match; turns out they’d switched the scans for him and his colleague.

It should have been obvious from the photo that our friend was the same person. It was, in fact, but there was no way to easily update the record to deal with the mistake. It took months to sort out and even if the TSA is very polite about secondary interviews, it adds at least an hour of sitting around being checked on before you can get into daylight and start adjusting to the time zone.

Security is a process rather than a state; it’s what you do rather than what you are. But the process of how you get to be secure - as an individual or a country - has to be right too. Just putting biometrics into a system doesn’t make it more secure.

Steve Ballmer was kidding around with former Mac evangelist Guy Kawasaki at the MIX 08 conference here in Las Vegas, but there was an edge to a lot of the banter. Kawasaki had a MacBook Air hidden amongst his papers and he flourished it, asking if Ballmer wouldn’t like a machine that light and thin. Ballmer hefted the machine and bellowed that his notebook was lighter and a real machine to boot, complete with an Ethernet port. “That thing is missing half the features of a PC. Where is your DVD drive, let me look for that. I’ll have a bake-off with my Tosh versus that thing backstage…”

It’s halfway between good theatre and Ballmer’s enthusiasm, but there’s always a shrewd side to it. When one attendee persuaded him to stand up and do the “Web developers, Web developers, Web developers…” dance, Ballmer followed it up by saying if it was a bet, he wanted half the winnings. And there’s more to his PC than the weight.

If it’s ligher than a MacBook Air and it has a DVD drive, Ballmer’s machine must be the Toshiba Portégé R500, a notebook that’s so light I’ve seen it hanging from a helium balloon. The publicity might cheer Toshiba up after the HD DVD debacle, but it’s also a good way to look at what Silverlight and IE 8 really mean to Microsoft.

Today, most users need a DVD drive - for installing software or watching films on a long flight. In five years time, Ballmer said, “it may not make a bit of difference”. In five years, online applications and services may take over from desktop apps as well (although ubiquitous connectivity is years away - the only decent 3G speed we’ve ever had was in San Diego, home of Qualcomm, whereas travelling in Arizona you can’t get voice let alone data, because Cellular One has no international roaming agreements).

If they do, Microsoft will be ready because Silverlight is designed for applications: Silverlight 1 is video, Silverlight 2 is a cross-platform development platform that you can write for in a range of languages. AOL’s Silverlight mail app will look the same everywhere and be the same code everywhere. Even though it runs on a Mac or a Linux box (with Novell’s Moonlight plug-in), it’s not leaving behind the Windows heritage because Silverlight is a substantial proportion of the Windows Presentation Foundation.

Silverlight runs in the browser, WPF apps run on the desktop (and because Moonlight is based on the .NET clone Mono, WPF apps could come out of the browser on Linux but not on the Mac). Aston Martin showed a Silverlight app in Ray Ozzie’s keynote that lets you look at a car in great detail and pick the colours and finishes that you like, then make an appointment with a dealer; they showed the companion WPF app for the dealer to show you that custom car in true 3D, on a large screen controlled by a UMPC (the 3D model isn’t running on the UMPC, it’s on a high-end gaming PC with an NVIDIA card that the Aston team bought at the local PC shop in Vegas).

Same APIs, same programming model, same graphic files, same controls, same XAML markup. Cirque du Soleil’s recruitment app runs on tablet PCs today and they copy files by hand to review in an intranet application; they showed a prototype of a WPF app to use on the road for assessing performer auditions and a Silverlight intranet app that the Mac users in the office can use to review the auditions that are automatically synchronized.

Internet Explorer 8 gets synchronization too, with local storage for Web sites; so if you’re halfway through a document and you have to leave the office and get on a plane, the Web app you’re writing it in can switch to offline mode and let you save the file. To start with this will be like a big cookie in a simple text file, but the IE team plans to implement a local database for future versions, which will let developers write more powerful Web apps that work offline and on. Making the back button work on Ajax sites - so you can zoom in to a map and click Back to zoom out again - is great for users; the address bar will update as well, so when you get to the right place on the map you’ll be able to copy the URL to send to a friend. But that’s also good news for Ajax Web apps; the app could save your state locally and put you back to where you were last time you visited. A lot of IE is playing catchup, but the team is looking at the bigger picture too.

Silverlight takes Microsoft beyond Windows and beyond PCs. Silverlight for mobile starts with Silverlight 1 and video, so we have to wait longer for the cross-platform apps to go mobile. But Nokia is putting Silverlight on S60 phones - and Moonlight will run on Linux phones. There’s no reason why you couldn’t have a version of Silverlight for Xbox - and at this point you should think of the Mesh service for syncing PCs and devices that Ray Ozzie hinted at in his keynote. Today you need the PC with the DVD drive and the Ethernet port and the full operating system and the full applications. In five years time you might be mixing and matching an app on your phone with an ultralight notebook for longer trips and a full PC back at base - and using Silverlight and WPF on all of them.

In “The Graduate” Robert De Niro was given one word of career advice: Plastics.

After this year’s O’Reilly Emerging Technologies conference I’ve got one word for all of you out there: Visualisation.

We’re being faced with more and more complex data sources that we need to turn into something useful. There’s a huge amount of raw data out there, in company reports, in scientific data and in the millions of words that fill the Internet (and our hard disks). The question is, how can we avoid drowning in this information?

The answer is simple - providing tools that can be used to give easy access to the information that’s there, and along with managing that data and mining it, and then making it easy to display the information graphically. Presenter after presenter at ETech showed off various graphs and visualisations that helped make sense of the information they were working with.

One example came from the team at design company Stamen. Working with the folk at MySociety they’d produced a map of London that mixed and mashed transport times with house prices. All you needed to do was move the sliders to find an area that met your budget and the time you want to get up. Their demo also showed how housing prices flowed across the San Francisco Bay area, and how they bubbled up and down in Texas sub-divisions.

Another presentation, from Saul Griffith, used visualisation to put his personal carbon footprint in perspective - and how it matched to his personal energy budget. The graphs and diagrams he’d produced meant that it was easy for him to decide where he needed to cut back - and how the cut backs could be linked to changes he was meaning to make in his life anyway.

Paul Torrens is using visualisation techniques to model the behaviouir of crowds. With 3D models and animations he’s able to show how people exit a building in an emergency, and how a demonstration becomes a riot. Using the information from his simulations architects can design safer buildings, along with cities that can reduce the risks of a peaceful demonstration becoming something else - and protecting the peaceful majority that are just trying to avoid being caught up in clashes between police and people just along for the fight.

These folk are the “alpha geeks”. They may have more of a grasp of what they’re looking for in the data than most of us, but they’re using the tools we already have. Data analysed in Excel can become a web 2.0 mashup or a set of well designed PowerPoint slides. We can use these techniques to visualise data ourselves, building dashboards of the information that we need or want.

There is one danger here: it’s very easy to trust the visualisations that someone else has made. Are they manipulating the data to give the results they want? The only answer is to learn how to visualise complex data ourselves, becoming adept at manipulating and merging information in our chosen tools. Tools like Microsoft’s SQL Server Reporting Services are key to this, as is getting to grips with Excel’s Business Intelligence features.

It’s a brave new world. Let’s take advantage of it.

–Simon

Sometimes weeks have a theme. This last week’s was most definitely virtualisation.

Cannes in February is a refreshing change from an English winter, and it’s where HP were announcing their latest storage virtualisation platform - along with servers that come with VMware’s ESX 3i hypervisor built-in. Getting the right physical infrastructure for your virtualised server farm is becoming increasingly important, along with beign able to deploy your virtualised images quickly.

That’s where ESX 3i comes in handy - it’s a 32MB hypervisor that doesn’t need an OS. Boot your server, connect to the hypervisor from one of VMware’s handy management tools, and you’re ready to configure the hard disk and deploy all the virtual machine images you need (and if you’re using BEA’s Liquid VM thin Java servers that can be a lot!). Now that most of the major industry standard server vendors support ESX 3i, with hardware shipping from IBN, Dell and Fujitsu as well as HP, it’s going to be easy to quickly add new compute resources to a virtual infrastructure. All you’ll need to do is order the appropriate server from your usual vendor, shove it in the rack (or the blade host), and a few mouse clicks later you’ve got a server.

Microsoft is going to have to do a lot to compete with this. Its Hyper-V VM is still several months away - and it will still need its own partition to run and manage the rest of the virtual machines running on your server hardware. Sun’s xVM will have similar issues, as will the open-source Xen hypervisor.

HP’s launch was in its Sophia Antipolis offices, as VMworld Europe was just down the road. With more than 4500 attendees, it was definitely the place to be if you were running a virtual infrastructure. BT’s plans to roll out a service oriented virtual network with global load balancing was a benchmark for the maturity of virtual infrastructures, and a fascinating look at how businesses can encourage the move to virtualisation. BT’s decision to make physical server implementations subject to a rigorous review process and hefty chargebacks is intended to make this an economic decision - with virtualisation the clear winner on ease of deployment and lower costs.

At Vmworld Europe the thin client was one of the elephants in the room. While the server products got the stage time, client virtualization got a set of ropy demonstrations which were, to say the least, confusing. Conflating VMware’s impressive VDI virtualised desktop tools with managed desktop virtual machines, CEO Diane Greene demonstrated how virtual machines could be deployed to desktop PCs, and how thin client applications could be used offline and on the road. Given that presentation it would be easy to confuse two very different ways of managing virtualised desktop environments.

Microsoft made a lot more of client virtualisation at its 2008 server wave launch last Wednesday. That’s not surprising, especially when you consider that its big server success story of the moment is its relatively recent acquisition SoftGrid. Delivering applications over the network is a powerful way of controlling user desktops, and reducing your support costs. SoftGrid’s impressive sales figures are even more impressive, when you realise it’s only available through Microsoft’s volume licensing programme.

Perhaps the ideal infrastructure is a hybrid. VMware virtual servers hosting enterprise applications, with SoftGrid -wrapped applications streaming from the server network on to desktop PCs. The PCs themselves might be thin clients fed by Citrix’s tools running on an array of desktop blades somewhere in your data centre. It’s all a blast from the past - the mainframe is back.

This time, however, it’s an ever-growing array of industry standard servers hosting a virtual infrastructure, while applications are delivered to not green screens, but thin client devices with HD quality LCD panels. It’s a brave new enterprise IT world out there.

–Simon