New England VMUG at Gillette Stadium with GreenPages

Returning to the scene of the crime...

I joked with my wife that there would probably be police "crime scene" tape surrounding Gillette Stadium as I arrived for the 2011 New England Winter VMUG. Almost a week prior, I was one of the lucky 64,000 people to be in attendance as our beloved home team, the New England Patriots, were embarrassed by the New York Jets in the NFL playoffs.

As I pushed those playoff memories out of my head, I decided to focus on my task at hand: to educate people about VDI and how Unidesk is allowing companies to realize the full promise of Virtual Desktops.

We were invited to join one of our key partners, GreenPages, at their table and we were busy from start to finish.

What seemed to draw people over to our area was the two Patriots Cheerleaders hired by another sponsor - you could have your picture taken with them and a signed official Patriots Cheerleader poster. That said, I am confident that is was the Unidesk Management Console we had on display and our banner that states "Unidesk makes VDI better" that drew people over to our table. Needless to say, this led to many a conversation beginning with an attendee asking "How do you guys make VDI better".

My response was simple and to the point: We give companies the ability to offer fully personalized, 100% persistent desktops. Whether your users are installing applications, program add-ons, saving files locally, or sharing macros their desktop experience will remain the same and persist through updates to the OS or IT delivered application.

Each and every conversation continued into a discussion of their VDI initiative. As expected, some people were early on and they were still educating themselves and their company about VDI, but it does appear the market has taken a turn and more people have VDI projects with definitive timelines, project scopes, and budgets established for 2011. Also, it appears people who have deployed VDI but are facing challenges with user adoption, storage growth, and other issues are realizing the market now has products capable of helping their VDI project get to where they need to be (Obviously Unidesk is the best :).

2011 is shaping up to be the year when VDI takes off and I just feel lucky to be a part of the Unidesk team.

We are making VDI better, one customer at a time.

Kudos to Chris Harney, his wife, and their entire team for putting on such a great event!! Too bad the Pats weren't so organized! I look forward to seeing you all in a few months at the next one in Connecticut.

James Saunders