Michelle Laverick…

Well, I’ve just completed my first full week here at Droplet Computing – and I’m loving every moment.

There are so many things I could blog about right now, but I’m opting to do a blog post a week – mainly so I don’t fire everything off in a hailstorm only to dry up months later. But also because I’m drinking from the firehose (more Silicon Valley-speak) at the moment. Blogging isn’t really what I’m here for, and there’s other “real” work that must take a priority. I have a very healthy to-do list that needs focusing on – I’ve got a security guide to write for a government based deal, and partner enablement collateral to update and improve, as well as QA testing.

But anyway, I thought I would start off with discussing a pretty critical use-case that I’m already seeing out there with customers – and what my colleagues are seeing in terms of engagements with partners and their customers.

The blogpost titles need a bit of explanation.

The metaphor of the “rockpool” came from a customer who we need to buy a beer sometime (many beers!). I think it’s a wonderful metaphor for what is beginning to become a concrete fact. Many organizations have had programs to decommission Windows XP from their estate, but the rapidly retreating tide of Windows XP has left behind significant rockpools of Windows XP. Often Senior Management has little or no visibility of this fact. That isn’t down to not knowing their environments, but more to do with how impossible it is to keep a handle on the vast expanse of technologies at use in various parts of a sprawling organization. There’s also a kind of reluctance to admit to Senior Management that these rockpools of Windows XP exist. Ironically, these rockpools form a small percentage of the environment, but in a company of 25K, 50K, 75K or 100K that small percentage actually represents a significant thorn in the paw of IT strategy to get off legacy Windows, and onto Windows10.

This is also something our technology partners are seeing as well. Those partners have major projects to roll out new EUC projects that are based around the more “workspace” approach. Those of us who have been in the space for a while will know that the “one-portal-to-rule-them-all” concept is not new… But old ideas that once gained little traction in the past can come along a decade later and be successful. Bottom-line is there are often few really new innovative ideas in our industry, just concepts that have been knocking around for some time, whose time has now come. Of course, many of these new projects are geared up to automate logins and fulfilments for cloud-native applications, and the kind of apps found present in a Windows10 environment. Trouble is, that does not help any accounts department still using macros in Microsoft Excel 2010. It’s in this way that Droplet Computing complements (never ever, competes!) the Workspace model, which is really the future of EUC delivery for the conceivable future. IMHO.

So far, so legacy. The other big opportunity I’m seeing is on the horizon. Hopefully, not too distant – and that’s getting Droplet Computing on ChromeOS. I saw a news article recently how the education sector has been moving away significantly from Windows to adopt Chomebooks and Pixelbooks. There’s some (but not much) evidence of that happening in the public sector as authorities try to squeeze the very last from budgets that are already under pressure. The bottom line here is people who must upgrade (because of Windows XP and also Windows7), but don’t have the budget to do so will creatively find other solutions. Necessity is the Mother of virtue after all. Again, the problem here is getting legacy applications on to those devices, without having to resort to constructing a big VDI solution (load-balancers, DMZ navigation, storage, image build optimization etc., etc.) to run a couple of poxy but important legacy apps. I’ll blog more about Google’s Project Crostini in future, once I’ve got my hands dirty.

That leads me to “Shadow XP”. To be fair this is my feeble attempt at clickbait marketerism (did it work?!?  ). We have all heard over the years about Shadow IT. The situation where developers and middle-managers whip out their credit card to dial-up resources from the public cloud. The reasons for that are well documented elsewhere, but the result is the same. It creates a kind of stealthy IT infrastructure that is not detectable on the Senior Management radar. Put simply, you don’t know, what you don’t know. And what you can’t see, doesn’t exist until it comes along and bites you on the bum. In the world of Shadow IT, this is usually a financial ceiling being triggered. In the world of Shadow XP that is an unexpected security breach caused by an operating system you believed had been expunged from your organization years ago. I accept that you, my friend, have absolutely not one drop of Shadow XP remaining in your environment, and like the Trojan’s you have nothing to fear about the wooden horse that appeared within the walls of your fortress this morning.

Dismiss Shadow XP as FUD and “Fake IT News” if you like, but it’s better to be safe than to be sorry after the fact…