Have you ever sat in on a TelePresence meeting? It really makes you think about how technology can make distance disappear, and bring together people across a wide geography for the purpose of collaborating and sharing ideas. Such is the case with the National Townhall on Desktop Virtualization I participated in recently, along with VMware.
Seven industry experts from seven US cities, discussing the impact or key learnings of implementing desktop virtualization in government, healthcare and education. I was joined by my colleague Chris Westphal of VMware, and our panelists, bringing firsthand experiences of their journey to desktop virtualization. If you want to attend the interactive webcast of this event, please click here – I think you’ll find it incrementally valuable if you’re on the verge of a pilot, proof of concept or just researching your options.
This experience reminded me of something important regarding the transformation of the user desktop as we know it. Immersive business video is increasingly becoming a modality of enterprise collaboration that workers will depend on to be productive. Consider the fact that ten people had meaningful discourse in this session, without any of them having to board a plane. IP telephony is the same – we can’t imagine a day without access to our phone. So when we talk about using virtual desktops making people more productive, and making business more agile, it makes total sense that we expect by extension of that premise, voice, video and virtual desktops to converge in a single workspace that’s accessible on any device, anywhere. We depend on all of these modalities to be effective, not just one.
Today, there is lots of buzz around the big news from Cisco and our ecosystem partners with the launch of next generation VXI validated solutions. If you missed our launch event, you can still get all the details online via our community.
Pretty cool but, why is virtualization important for government agencies?
cost control, more than ever government agencies are focused on strategies to improve operational efficiency and reduce costs
flexibilty, allow government workers ability to work in different workplaces, from city hall to public works, with choices of different combinations of virtual desktops, voice, and video devices including latest smartphones, tablets, and Cisco Virtualization Experience Clients (VXC)
security, better security and control of information in the data center rather than distributed endpoints and with the ”bring your own device” (BYOD) to work phenomenon, security is more critical than ever
uncompromised, helping government agencies achieve mission objectives without compromising cost or resilience mandates
It’s an exciting day at Cisco because today the company unveiled the next phase of its Virtualization Experience Infrastructure with host of innovations that are bringing the new virtual workspace to life.
What does this virtual workspace look like?
First of all, it’s all about the experience: giving end users a way to actually enjoy exceptional voice and video collaboration in a virtualized desktop environment.
It’s about simplicity: how can we help IT support a data center infrastructure that can host ever-increasing numbers of virtual desktops with simplicity, scalability, security.
And, it’s about giving IT the tools they need to deploy with confidence: providing customers with innovative ways to speed large scale deployments.
To find out what we are doing in each one of these areas, take a moment to watch this video featuring Roberto De La Mora, senior director, Collaboration Solutions Marketing, Cisco.
You can also learn more by reading the press release or visiting the Virtual Launch Experience, where you can see demonstrations of newly announced products, ask Cisco product experts questions about our latest introductions, or attend an in-depth technical briefing.
In case you missed it, you can still watch the National Town Hall for the Next Generation Workplace online. 
Shane Milam
Josh Sawislak 
Brooks Moore 
Chris Westphal
