Opinion: Destination Desktop

Computerworld - Back in 1985, I shoehorned my way into a room packed with Sun Microsystems engineers to listen to company co-founder Bill Joy talk about on-demand computing. He was one of the earliest thinkers on the subject. Of course, that's not what he was calling it back then. And he wasn't talking about servers with capacity on demand either. His ideas revolved around how to exploit all those idle MIPS on desktop workstations, which was all Sun made at the time.

Nearly 20 years later Sun, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and other vendors are touting on-demand computing as an advanced server-centric technology that can help manage peak-and-valley processing-load problems while keeping costs down. Each vendor has its own technical approach (and terminology) for how servers can be leveraged in an on-demand model. But they're not talking about desktops any longer. And that's a shame, because there are still some interesting applications where the on-demand model works well for workstations.

For example, Greg Bolcer, chief technology officer and founder of Endeavors Technology Inc. in Irvine, Calif., says providing Windows applications on demand would be ideal for things such as user training or application testing.

"It makes no sense to install a full application on a desktop if the user isn't going to be working with it for an extended period of time," says Bolcer.

And he's right. That's why he came up with AppExpress. It streams Windows software to PCs on an as-needed basis. According to Bolcer, it takes as little as 1% and no more than 10% of an application to be loaded on a Windows system before the operating system (with the help of an AppExpress agent) can launch it while the rest of the bits are flowing down the wire. That means users can start working almost immediately.

AppExpress might also appeal to IT managers who want to ensure that all of their users are working with the same release of an application. Instead of the IT department remotely loading desktops with software that users might spiff up with plug-ins or updates from CDs, every user can load the same version of an application from a single server that's centrally managed. Bolcer claims it works with both commercial products and custom applications.

Another on-demand computing tool is peer-to-peer software. Yes, it can be the bane of your existence if some of your users are hip music lovers who continue to flaunt copyright laws and chew up network bandwidth exchanging MP3 files. But peer-to-peer can be applied cleverly to benefit your users.

Or so thinks Marty Lafferty, CEO of the Distributed Computing Industry Association in Arlington, Va. His group's goal is to legitimize the now-stigmatized file-sharing protocol in the eyes of the entertainment industry so that more content will be made available to peer-to-peer users. While that's a Promethean task given the Luddite mentality of most entertainment executives, he may actually get more immediate traction with IT vendors that can leverage the protocol for knowledge-based applications.

Peer-to-peer, Lafferty suggests, is "an ideal protocol for the discovery and delivery of content." With it, knowledge management applications and search engines will be able to reach "the next level" of capability, he says.

Imagine a peer-to-peer application running inside a pharmaceutical company's R&D department. Each time one researcher learns something from an experiment, the results can be automatically provided to other interested scientists. Although there are knowledge management systems that do similar things today, they are tough to implement, difficult to manage and expensive to deploy. Peer-to-peer is a straightforward, open protocol anyone can use.

Both Bolcer and Lafferty are grateful that the big vendors are endlessly bending your ear with chatter about the advantages of on-demand computing.

"We're riding that wave," Bolcer says. "It's nice not having to educate users on the benefits of on-demand computing."

However, before advocates of on-demand computing for desktops ride the crest of that wave inside IT departments, they'll need to apply the system management discipline common among server vendors. For one thing, they'll need to factor in complex corporate security requirements, which are easier to manage on servers than on individual desktops. Managing bandwidth for on-demand purposes that emanate from desktops is tougher than controlling it from servers.

That's why we're seeing so much of the on-demand excitement and development on these centralized server systems.

Still, the server vendors are ignoring the beginning of the on-demand computing story: the part that begins on your desktop. Mark Hall is a Computerworld editor at large. Contact him at mark_hall@computerworld.com.