UC and virtual desktops

One exciting option with unified communications is the UC Dashboard, the software client that brings together user interfaces to presence, contact lists, e-mail, voice, video, conferencing and instant messaging. Dashboards, and softphones in general, bring up the even more exciting possibility of combining UC and virtual desktops.

Virtual desktops present IT with the opportunity to make all core enterprise desktop functionality hardware- and location-independent, just as a dashboard or softphone make VoIP independent of dedicated hard phones. Combining soft desktops with soft communications looks good for a couple of reasons:

1.) It improves teleworking. This means it also supports green initiatives by reducing commutes. In our research, more than 85% of organizations report an increase in teleworkers this year, with improved employee retention the No. 1 reason for increasing support for telework, cited by 82% of organizations. More than half of businesses (52%) cite advancing green initiatives as a reason for supporting telework.

2.) It can improve business continuity and disaster recovery. If a building goes dark or a pandemic or other disaster makes using a building impossible, remote desktops with enterprise UC functionality provide complete ongoing access to enterprise functions independent of location. Users can get in from home, from cyber-cafes, or from vanilla PCs rolled in on a semi.

Like UC alone, though, virtual desktop environments are demanding when it comes to the WAN. Latency and packet loss are the key problems to address. Bandwidth is not usually the problem – like an individual voice call, actual bandwidth requirements for a desktop are pretty low. But, since the user experience is determined by the perceived responsiveness of the remote desktop, the ability of input to get back to the virtual desktop, and of output to get back to the remote client is critical to a satisfactory user experience. So, added latency in the circuits (beyond what physics dictates) as well as packet losses (requiring retransmissions) really hurt.

Add UC to the picture, and the performance requirements just get steeper, as bandwidth needs go up — rolling video is rolling video! — and tolerance of jitter decreases. But, as organizations shift to IP communications and continue to expand support for telework, the combination of UC and virtual desktops will inevitably grow more widespread and more critical. If companies intend to use virtual desktops in support of virtualized contact centers — a specialized instance of telework that 46% of organizations already support to some extent — the combination is mission critical now.

Though these performance challenges exist, there are solutions. Companies using UC, desktop virtualization or a combination of the two must implement optimization technologies. Without optimization (products that combine compression, latency reduction, caching, load balancing, and more) UC-enabled virtual desktop will be difficult to effectively control.