LAS VEGAS — IT pros can’t ignore the International Consumer Electronics Show anymore.

Well, that’s not entirely true. IT pros can ignore a lot of it. All that stuff about cars and cameras and TVs and sound systems, while pretty cool, doesn’t really affect enterprise IT. But CES also serves as the launching pad for new smartphones, tablets and other technologies that, thanks to consumerization, IT now has to pay attention to.

Here’s a brief rundown on some of today’s CES news that IT pros should be aware of:

Microsoft shares Windows 8, Kinect details

This year marks Microsoft’s last CES keynote, and many attendees expected the company to go out with a bang. That didn’t happen. CEO Steve Ballmer, alongside host Ryan Seacrest, spent most of the time re-hashing projects we all know Microsoft has been working on for a while. But there were some tidbits of note.

On the Windows 8 front, the company is sticking to its late-February release date for the public beta. As with most Windows releases, there have been rumblings of delays, but if those rumblings are true, Microsoft didn’t give any indication. Chief marketing officer Tami Reller also said that, when it comes to Windows 8′s new Metro user interface, developers won’t have to build separate applications to run on x86-based PCs and ARM-based mobile devices.

And in more exciting news, Ballmer said Kinect for Windows will be available Feb. 1. Kinect has become mighty popular as the motion-sensing technology in Microsoft’s Xbox 360 video game system, but the company sees it as a potential game-changer for business applications — especially in certain verticals, such as healthcare and industrial design.

Droid 4, now with Citrix Receiver

Among all the announcements of new mobile devices, Motorola’s Droid 4 news should stick out for IT. That’s because the Verizon Wireless smartphone will come preloaded with Citrix Receiver for desktop and application virtualization.

Sure, Citrix Receiver is available in most app stores already, but by installing it directly on the Droid 4, Motorola is placing its chips on this method of controlling and delivering corporate apps to personal devices.

VMware mobile virtualization creeps along

VMware’s mobile virtualization vision took one very, very small baby step towards reality. One of the company’s smartphone hardware partners, LG, said it will finally bring VMware Horizon Mobile to market in the coming months.

Mobile virtualization lets IT create a separate, secure work environment on users’ smartphones. VMware started talking about the technology in 2008 and announced a few hardware and carrier deals last year, but today was the first time we’d heard any sort of official news about a release date. Our news writer James Furbush will have a full story on the state of the mobile virtualization market later this week.

VMware updated its View clients for Apple iPads and Android tablets today, and View shops will soon have an Amazon Kindle Fire client as well.

The tech previews of VMware View clients with PC-over-IP (PCoIP) support for Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux are also available. Previously, View clients for Mac OS X only supported Remote Desktop Protocol, which meant poor performance.

“We should have waited for PCoIP before delivering those clients,” said Pat Lee, director of end user clients for VMware. “But all of our clients now support PCoIP.”

The use case for running virtualized Windows OSes and applications on mobile devices using a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) client lies mostly in education — universities that want to adopt server-based desktops to deliver university apps on Macs, Kindle Fire and other student-owned devices, Lee said. And broad client device support is important to companies with bring your own device policies.

VMware has faced criticism for having a very short list of View clients, compated to competitor Citrix’s client support list, which still includes far more tablets and smartphones. There aren’t VMware View clients for the iPhone or Blackberry devices, for instance. VMware admits it must support all types of client devices in order to gain new VDI customers and will continue to grow its client support list, Lee said.

The existing clients integrate with View 4.6 and 5.0, and all are available for free to View customers. They are available from Apple’s App Store, Google’s Android Market and, for Cisco Cius users, Cisco’s AppHQ. In addition, VMware View for Linux is available to download from the Ubuntu Software Center, and the Kindle Fire client will be available in the Amazon Appstore for Android this month.

By Bridget Botelho, Senior Site Editor

AUSTIN, Texas — A session here at Dell World on the convergence of endpoint devices turned out to be a support group for administrators dealing with the consumerization of IT and bring-your-own-device policies.

About 100 IT folks weighed the pros and cons of bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies and shared their experiences of begrudgingly supporting personal smartphones, iPads and other tablets in addition to corporate-owned PCs.

Part of the problem is that the BYOD concept goes against the ideals of platform standardization in corporations. Tablets are convenient, but they have limitations, so end users can’t ditch their PCs entirely.

“Users can’t use their iPad to run AutoCAD, but they don’t care,” one attendee said. “They still want one. All we can do is be flexible and suggest specs and configurations, but we see the gamut of devices anyway.”

That sense of defeat was palpable in the room. Administrators know that the consumerization of IT is happening, with or without their support.

“You have to support them, because end users are circumventing IT in ways you wouldn’t believe,” another attendee said.

In companies that do let employees use their tablets for work, IT ends up managing multiple platforms per end user, which is obviously not a popular concept among time-strapped administrators.

“We have all of these employees who want iPads, and if we let them use those devices, we end up supporting all these different browsers and applications and wireless environments,” one attendee griped. “These are the same employees who don’t even know what a wireless connection is.”

Other attendees shared stories of end users who they said are too clueless to take responsibility for their own devices — particularly when running corporate applications on them. Many end users don’t know how to ensure a connection is secure, for instance.

One answer to that problem is desktop virtualization, which lets IT remotely deliver a corporate desktop image and also kill that image if a device is stolen, compromised or infected by a virus.

There are plenty of IT shops that support BYOD using desktop virtualization, particularly in higher education, where students bring their own Macs, iPads and Android devices and expect to access university apps and data on those devices anytime, from anywhere.

The corporate world uses that approach as well. One session attendee said her employer gives each employee a $1,200 stipend every three years to buy devices and support from the vendor of his or her choice, so that the company IT department does not have to support those devices. Administrators simply deliver virtual desktops to end users and manage the desktop image on the back end.

Whether that approach to BYOD saves companies money depends, because large companies get client devices at a corporate discount. Desktop virtualization isn’t exactly cheap, either, and there are also some performance limitations with remote desktops that vendors still have to overcome.

But the multi-device movement is happening with or without IT support, so it’s a good idea to investigate some BYOD options. As Steve Schuckenbrock, president of Dell Services, said this week, IT has little choice but to embrace the notion of consumerization.

“The always-on, always-available infrastructure is bringing itself to bear in the commercial space,” he said. “CIOs can either fend it off or embrace it and support the availability everywhere, anytime. … It’s innovate or die.”

As the bring-your-own device phenomenon grows, so do the options for separating personal and business communications on the same device.

Desktop virtualization delivers self-contained business operating systems and applications to smartphones and tablets. Technologies such as VMware’s Mobile Virtualization Platform and AT&T’s Toggle let users essentially keep two phones — one for business use, one for personal use — on the same device. And with a new release from ShoreTel, employees can securely tap into their companies’ unified communications (UC) systems from their mobile devices.

“We’re starting to see a lot of interest in companies that want to make the mobile device the primary method of communication,” said analyst Irwin Lazar, a vice president at Nemertes Research.

ShoreTel focuses on mobile unified communications

Announced this week, the latest version of ShoreTel Mobility aims to provide user-friendly mobile unified communications access. An employee downloads an app, which integrates with his or her phone’s existing dialer and contact list, and IT then provisions that device for access to the UC system.

When the employee calls a personal contact, the phone makes the call as usual. But when the employee calls a business contact, ShoreTel Mobility kicks in — automatically connecting to the VPN if outside the corporate firewall — and the user has access to the company’s full UC features.

“It makes it a lot easier to use,” Lazar said. “From a user perspective, it’s just like any other app.”

As with any bring-your-own-device (BYOD) initiative, device support is a major factor in whether a new project will succeed or not. ShoreTel Mobility supports 12 Android devices running version 2.1 or higher, Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, plus the latest BlackBerry OS 6 devices.

“Most of our customers used to be focused on the BlackBerry … and as Android and iPhone got more popular, this whole bring-your-own-device phenomenon got its legs and took off,” said Pejman Roshan, ShoreTel’s vice president of mobility.

ShoreTel Mobility also connects to all leading PBX systems in addition to ShoreTel’s, including those from Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks and Microsoft.

“A lot of [other vendors] have a fairly limited number of mobile devices that they’ll support, and it brings it back into their own portfolio,” said Frank Stinson, partner and senior analyst with Intellicom Analytics. “It’s not supporting the bring-your-own-device thing as well as [ShoreTel].”

The ShoreTel Mobility app does not store any data locally on users’ devices, so IT admins can de-provision employees without wiping out the personal data on their phones — a common complaint among users.

“They can containerize the app, knock out the app, put a poison pill in the app, whatever you want to call it, and not take out the whole device,” Roshan said.

Mobile and desktop virtualization options

ShoreTel Mobility is focused on keeping personal and business phone calls separate, but other approaches pay more attention to data and apps.

VMware and Verizon Wireless will announce this week they are partnering to offer personal and business segregation on smartphones, according to IDG News Service. They will presumably use VMware’s Mobile Virtualization Platform (MVP), a smartphone hypervisor that allows multiple operating systems to run on the same device — in effect creating isolated environments that users can switch between based on the tasks they need to perform.

Also this week, AT&T announced Toggle, a similar feature based on technology from Enterproid, whose Divide platform lets users create secure enterprise profiles to access on their personal smartphones.

A major problem with VMware MVP and AT&T Toggle is that, as of now, they only run on Android devices, said Mike Sapien, principal analyst with Ovum.

“Multiple platforms, multiple operating systems, multiple devices is a lot more friendly for the users,” he said.

Their go-to-market strategies may also cause issues for IT admins, who are looking to make their jobs easier, not harder, Stinson said.

“ShoreTel’s selling to the enterprise and providing an architecture to support users’ existing devices,” he said. “The carriers are coming at it from the other angle. If they’re contracting with the user, that’s kind of an administrative hassle for the enterprise.”

Desktop virtualization technologies aren’t an ideal solution, either. Reliance on connectivity and the performance of Windows OSes and apps on mobile devices are still obstacles for many organizations. As Bob Egan, managing director of MGI Research, put it at last week’s Interop conference, “Virtualization is a mess right now. … The company that figures out media support and application and OS neutrality is going to be a big company.”

Photo (cc) by Trace Meek and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.