Unidesk and VMware enable Ohio DODD to virtualize 1,500 desktops for all workers and all use cases

This week we announced that the Ohio Department of Developmental Disabilities (DODD) is virtualizing its 1,500 desktops with Unidesk, VMware View, and VMware vSphere. While 1,500 desktops is a good-sized VDI deployment, that's not what caught the attention of eWEEK, who ran a nice story on the news. It's that 1,500 desktops represents just about all of the workers at the agency, and all use cases.

VDI is succeeding in call centers, labs, off-shore development, and other types of non-persistent desktop use cases where user customizations can be jettisoned, and the same set of standard apps can be used by everyone. But VDI has the potential to go way beyond this. So why is DODD one of the first to broadly implement hosted virtual desktops?

Unidesk Founder and CTO Chris Midgley answered this question in his recent blog "The broken promise of VDI." He explained why, despite its awesome potential and great products like VMware View, hosted virtual desktops have been held back by architectures that are more complex than physical desktops. Incomplete and inadequate desktop customization. Applications that can't be virtualized. A patchwork of point tools for management that add more capital costs, and make it harder to realize the expected operational cost savings.

AppDetective did a good job covering many of these same issues in his guest blog "Does user virtualization matter?" on Brian Madden.com. His conclusion was that VDI's inability to move the needle much beyond the use cases that Terminal Services already addresses means that most organizations will be forced to run a mix of physical desktops, Terminal Services, and VDI for the foreseeable future. And hence, user virtualization/profile management tools like AppSense that can run across multiple types of endpoints become more appealing.

We agree that for some organizations, this will be the reality. But for many others, we think Unidesk is the game-changer that can expand VDI to more use cases, help VDI realize its full potential, and minimize the need for a heterogeneous, harder-to-manage desktop infrastructure.

Ohio DODD thinks so, too. They didn't accept that VDI couldn't work for all of their users - counselors, nurses, safety consultants, business analysts, administrators, office staff, executives - who need user-customizable desktops that support all types of applications - speech recognition, medical software, security, language translation, user-installed applications, and more. And they didn't accept that they needed a complex set of point tools to virtualize and manage each layer of the desktop - User, Applications, and OS. And another set of tools to reduce storage. Instead, they looked deeper for a solution that could help them leverage the massive benefits they've already realized virtualizing their servers with VMware vSphere, and duplicate this ROI on the desktop. That's how they found Unidesk.

My favorite quote from the eWEEK article on DODD pursuing virtual desktops: “Without Unidesk, I don’t know if we would have done it.”

You can hear DODD tell their story in the upcoming webinar 98% Virtualized: Ohio DODD's Innovative Approach to VDI Success, March 22 at 2pm ET. The webinar will feature Ohio DODD's Information Technology Manager Kipp Bertke, along with Matthew Honigford, Technical Account Manager at VMware, and Ron Oglesby, Unidesk Chief Solution Architect.

We look forward to working with Kipp and his team to show how the combination of VMware vSphere, VMware View, and Unidesk can help VDI realize its full potential by addressing a fuller set of desktop use cases.