With more than 400 million Windows 7 licenses sold, I always enjoy hearing from customers about their Windows 7 experience and the specific business value they are seeing as a result of deploying Windows 7 within their company. Based on these conversations, Windows 7 is evidently delivering a strong ROI for businesses, which is great feedback to hear from our customers. But at the same time, customers often ask what we recommend they do to help accelerate their Windows 7 deployments, streamline PC management, provide the best data security and, ultimately, help their employees be productive with the latest technologies, for faster ROI.

Microsoft’s desktop virtualization solutions can be an asset for businesses by helping IT professionals simplify management, accelerate deployment, and centralize IT operations for efficiencies. Additionally, these solutions give customers the flexibility to work everywhere, anytime, on a variety of devices, while keeping the corporate environment secure and users up and running. One of our customers, The Co-Operative Group – a diversified, consumer-owned organization that boasts some of the largest retail businesses in the United Kingdom – told us about their first-hand experience.

Ian Cawson, Technical Architect for the Co-operative Group said, “We decided to implement a virtual desktop environment because we knew that it would provide the flexibility we needed to enable employees to work from anywhere. It would also provide the IT staff with more control over desktops.” To implement this they deployed a variety of our Desktop Virtualization solutions including Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) and Citrix XenDesktop built on Hyper-V to create a virtual desktop environment and a flexible work experience for their users.

“Microsoft App-V and Hyper-V are essential to creating a cost-effective, dynamic, and reliable virtual desktop infrastructure,” and the joint solutions with “Microsoft and Citrix technologies provide a compelling desktop virtualization environment. They work great together, require very little overhead for us to manage, and deliver the capabilities that we need,” said Cawson.

Additionally, the Co-Operative Group, in tandem with its virtualization initiative, is also upgrading to the Windows 7 Enterprise operating system. To assist with this, they leveraged AppDNA’s AppTitude to provide critical insights about their application portfolio, which informed their decision to build their virtual desktop infrastructure based on App-V and Citrix.

As you can see, partners play a critical role in Windows 7 deployments. For the Co-Operative Group, Microsoft and Citrix were instrumental in achieving a successful desktop virtualization strategy. Citrix recommends Microsoft App-V as part of an overall application delivery strategy to customers using XenDesktop. As part of our joint partnership, Citrix this week announced support for Microsoft RemoteFX in XenDesktop 5.5. Together, with HDX and Microsoft RemoteFX, Citrix XenDesktop 5.5 delivers the most optimized user experience for any desktop and application, on any device in any location making it the best Windows 7 virtual desktop experience, with rich multimedia and comprehensive end point support.

It is clear that customers have embraced Microsoft and its partner’s desktop virtualization solutions, but their first step was to truly understand what desktop virtualization can do for their business. To help, we developed a whitepaper that uses business language to describe desktop virtualization and then clearly outlines the approach Microsoft takes. It’s a different take on a traditional whitepaper as it gives readers an interactive and fun way to learn more about Microsoft’s solutions. Read it here: Microsoft Desktop Virtualization White Paper.

And for those who may prefer an initial quick read, we also developed this infographic:

We hope these resources will be helpful when thinking about a desktop virtualization strategy. As always, we’d love to hear how we can be working towards giving customers the best value out of our solutions. For more information on our products, please visit www.microsoft.com/dv.