Following the virtualisation news feed as I have been over the last month, I notice that VMware’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure solution with its Virtual Desktop Manager 2 is fresh to the scene this week. Connecting users’ virtual desktops to the data centre to give IT admin staff extra control tends to produce a ‘comfort factor’ at both ends (sometimes, but please keep reading down) - and is often widely argued to make good sense from a security, upgrades and overall management and business continuity point of view.

The trend seems to be (and for sure, the salesmen out there will tell you) that the newest bunch of virtual desktop control environments will provide the kinds of controls previously only available for mission-critical server applications. Yes, they’ll tell you that costs will be controlled better than ever – but we expected that. What’s hopefully more interesting is that administrators can now manage thousands of desktops at once and reduce the time it takes to provision a new desktop from hours to minutes.

Just one comment from me:

IT admin staff tend to love this stuff. We know that.

General non-techie users think that this kind of technology is just great and they feel looked after and secure.

Developers, code-junkies and those with their fingers in the pie (so to speak) tend to hate all forms of virtual desktop management. They don’t want intrusion. The developer tends to know what they are doing and don’t always want systems administrators having this kind of access.

So how does VMware and other virtualisation gurus out there sell these products at ground level? Or doesn’t it matter as they CIO buys it in and they don’t have a choice?

I’m trying hard to get a handle on whether the new breed of personalisation and recommendation technologies currently spawning across the web are likely to be in the, “oh my god how did we ever live without that?” category - or simply another intrusive and invasive potential fissure for security concerns.

Amazon already knows which books we buy of course and likes to offer us more of the same, Google mail sometimes has some infuriating link options based upon what my previous searches might have been showing somewhere near my inbox – but thankfully I too busy reading mail to bother noticing these most of the time. But what we’ll see next, or so I read, is technology that treats individuals on the web as more ‘unique’ (ouch – sorry, that slipped in) so that recommendations are delivered at the individual level and are based on a combination of historical information and real-time shopping behaviour.

Bubbling up on the developer newsometer are the likes of companies that “do” this kind of thing such as CleverSet. This is essentially advanced statistical relational learning based on Bayesian network analysis and was originally developed by the company for the US Department of Defence.

This approach is said to drive more relevant experiences for online customers by using more types of data from more sources (such as time & date and seasonality), compared to techniques like collaborative filtering.

CleverSet would of course have us accept the benefits of product recommendations, direct email campaigns, recommendation-driven search results pages, personalised presentation and customised content – they say that recommendations appear on the web pages and in the locations that you, the user, have specified.

Personally, I love my iGoogle personalised gadgets home-page and welcome the chance to read news headlines, quote of the day and my inbox all in one go. So why not have more of my web experience personalised? Can we be bothered? Do we have time? Aren’t we all used to interpreting search results the way we want to by now? Will this be personalised perfection or will it be information intrusion?

In a December 2007 report entitled “Which Personalisation Tools Work For eCommerce — And Why,” Forrester Research principle analyst Sucharita Mulpuru noted: “Web site personalisation is an underleveraged weapon… As the amount of content online grows — particularly on e-commerce sites that often sell tens of thousands of different products — and consumers are left to wade through cumbersome experiences on their own, personalised e-commerce experiences promise customer engagement and loyalty through increased relevance. Enabled by external tools sometimes called personalisation engines, recommendation engines, discovery engines, or behavioural targeting tools, personalisation allows retailers to increase relevance through activities like matching cross-sells to customers based on interests or customising clickstream paths based on previous purchase or visit histories.”

Whatever your opinion, Art Technology Group last week acquired CleverSet for $10 million in cold hard cash, so they clearly believe in these concepts… so we may very well see this strain of technology surfacing in the stacks’ of the web elite very soon. Or will we?

For those techies out there who are also film buffs, you'll know that
Dante's Peak came out at around the same time as Volcano – and that
Deep Impact hit the screens at just about the same time as Armageddon.

So would you believe it (my guess is that you will) if I highlight the fact that both Sybase and Embarcadero last week announced free versions of their Eclipse-based database tools?

In the red corner: free until the end of the year we have the graphical Sybase WorkSpace Database Development tool which (it says here) enables visual SQL building, query analysis and sophisticated editing and debugging. Hmm, sophisticated debugging – that's a new one on me. Is that debugging with extra layers of reporting to ensure there's feedback into the application development lifecycle to improve total project design? Or is it standard debugging carried out in a smoking jacket with a brandy? OK, I'm being deliberately stupid – it is of course the ability to visually debug stored procedures, triggers, SQL Anywhere events and UDFs.

In the blue corner: also available free (in its community edition) is the EA/Studio Community Edition business process modeling (BPM) tool. This product, we’re told, is said to help database architects with documenting business processes and supports XML and the business process modeling notation (BPMN). It also includes standard process modeling elements and offers the ability to import Visio diagrams.

All good stuff I’m sure, but I wonder how these companies interplay their open approach to Eclipse-based development with their innate desire to say, “Hey, our product is the cream of the crop!” OK, I know these tools are at different levels, but I’ve attended one Eclipsecon in Burlingame California and it’s quite a bun fight. All the “partners” are visibly slapping each other on the back – yet desperate to get their various case studies, news, t-shirts etc. to the top of the pile.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not deliberately suggesting that there is infighting within the Eclipse community (evidence of which on the Internet only seems have to have surfaced in blogs such as this one)… but it must be tough at times for all these vendors to work together.

Especially when they have to both put out product announcements on the same day.

I used to be editor of a cross-platform software engineering magazine that every year ran a special games development issue - and we used to sell more copies of that issue than any other throughout the year. Strangely, games development specials sell better than an in-depth series of pieces on mainframes, storage or networking.

Funny that isn’t it?

I’m reminded of this as I was talking to Perforce today about some fairly standard Software Change Management issues. While I was chewing the fat with our spokesman du jour (European director of ops Dave Robertson) he mentioned that the editors of a certain game developer magazine (that shall remain nameless) had cheered up his mantelpiece with an award for best programming tool.

So, for those not in the games industry, rather than deride games developers for all the time they spend rendering nice graphic models and designing high-score sheets – let us instead recognise that both designers and developers in this space need the same kind of tools that the rest of the industry relies on. Change management is as good an issue as any to consider the fact that there is a need to manage the wide variety of game assets from large binary files and 3D models to sound effects, music and dialogue.

Having said all that – our games issue might have been the top seller, but our systems integration issue wasn’t far behind. So maybe there’s hope for us all.

I like to keep my virtualisation head tuned in now and again but it’s not an area I profess to have a long history of writing about. With that in mind, I sometimes have to juggle the well-known with the ‘hey, why didn’t I think of that?’ element.

To explain, if you have a poke around at what virtualisation specialists are doing these days – they are very much looking at complimentary ways that virtualisation can fit into existing (and therefore presumably trusted) technology infrastructures.

A case in point is virtualisation with an intelligent eye for change management.

At the enterprise level this means that your average IT director (and his or her team) will be looking for ways to automate resource management of hardware while high level system changes that will impact services are carried out. Crucially, they will want to do this right through the integration, testing, staging and user acceptance phases before committing the systems into production.

IBM, Intel, Zeus Technology and host of other names come to mind if I think about whom I might have last spoken to on virtualisation. But I’ll go the obvious route and mention VMWare as its Stage Manager product is in precisely this space. You’ve heard of the application management lifecycle right? Well this is the service transition lifecycle.

VMWare’s take on the subject is as follows: As new services or changes to existing services are being introduced (such as rolling out an upgrade to Exchange 2008 or making changes to a complex SAP installation) they often follow a sequence of stages such as integration, test, staging and user acceptance checking to ensure they are successfully tested, approved and configured for risk-managed deployment into production. IT typically maintains numerous dedicated "shadow instances" of the production environment to support the activities of each of these stages. These systems are prone to "drift" out of synch with the production configuration, jeopardizing the successful execution of system changes and updates and increasing the risk of production downtime.

So does their latest product address those issues and manage change for services within an environment where bags of virtualisation technologies are deployed? Well you can visit their web site if you’d like a list of reasons why they say it does. The reason I have mentioned it is I think it adds a new flavour to the whole concept of how companies working at that layer of the industry are having to learn about and operate with wider layers of the total technology infrastructure layer if they are to stay competitive.

As for me, it took me ages just to find a word for change that began with V, that’s my problem.