Scott Davis
End User Computing
Biography
I’ve been with VMware for 5 years and in the world of virtualization far longer. I am currently CTO for VMware’s End User Computing B.U. and a core staff member in VMware’s Corporate CTO Office.
In my current role, I have been involved in driving product and technology strategy spanning the breadth of VMware’s End User Computing products and initiatives, as well as cultivating advanced development and partnerships for the BU. I previously served as VMware's Chief Data Center Architect and Storage CTO. My background includes a mixture of both startup ventures and more established industry firms. Prior to joining VMware, I was Founder, President, and CTO of Virtual Iron Software, which originally created a unique clustered hypervisor that enabled virtual machines to span physical servers utilizing Infiniband as a shared memory-style interconnect. The company was later acquired by Oracle and became the basis of OracleVM. I was also VP/CTO at Mangosoft, an Internet software and storage startup company with pioneering peer-to-peer clustering, caching and file system products. I spent the early part of my career at D.E.C. where I was Technical Director for VAXClusters and VMS Volume Shadowing products, as well as Digital’s Windows NT clustering technology (later sold to Microsoft as the genesis of Microsoft 'Wolfpack' Cluster Server).
One of the primary reasons I joined VMware was to work with brilliant folks along with what I saw as the rare opportunity to be a part of the next great sea change in the computer industry and I have to say, I haven’t been at all disappointed! Whether it’s the Data Center, Desktops, Storage, System Management, Application Frameworks or Cloud Computing to name just a few, VMware’s innovations are drastically changing the way we think about and deliver IT solutions.
Posts by Scott Davis
Observations from Venture Beat Mobile Summit I recently had the pleasure of attending Venture Beat’s Mobile Summit and co-chairing two sessions on mobile’s effect on the enterprise with Gaurav Tewari, Director at SAP Ventures, and moderated by Dylan Tweney , Venture Beat Executive Editor. The sessions were roundtable discussions and focused on surfacing how mobile is impacting the enterprise and what issues and concerns are on executives’ minds. These were very engaging conversations that resonated strongly with me and I wanted to share some of the highlights and perspectives with a wider audience.
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Welcome to 2013, the era of multi-device mobile workspace, BYOD and the consumerization of IT. Let’s explore each of these. Consumerization of IT doesn’t mean encouraging your users to use unaccountable, non-compliant consumer services to get their work done. But it does mean that IT has competition!
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2012 Wrap up It’s been an exciting year of changes and innovations in End User Computing land. In the industry at large, we saw the continued, inescapable march of BYOD and end user choice, featuring Apple iPad domination of the tablet landscape, Macs in the enterprise and a duopoly of Android and iPhone in the smartphone world. We also saw the arrival of Windows 8 and while not emerging to widespread acclaim or the Microsoft domination of yesteryear, it was not a complete dud either. Microsoft has made a big and aggressive bet with its new, hybrid touch/keyboard user interface and application compatibility/availability ecosystem challenges and time will tell how it plays out in both the corporate and consumer worlds. From the VMware perspective,...
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David Stafford and Scott Davis The Myths of DaaS There is a lot of misinformation and FUD surrounding DaaS in the marketplace today. Some are the result of loose interpretation of licensing restrictions while others are more self-serving that the only DaaS achievable today comes in a form that a vendor has been selling for years and has decided to now attach the term ‘DaaS’ to describe it. We’ve heard all these claims and expect to hear more as the market continues to mature We intend to dispel these myths and back it up by showing recent innovations that are making true-DaaS a reality.
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Last year at VMworld 2011, we rolled out our vision for end user computing in the post PC era; a multi-device world where everyone is able to use the various devices of their choice to make them the most productive throughout the day for their business needs. IT is moving away from managing physical devices and towards managing and securing their user’s corporate identity, corporate applications and business data. Now, ‘post PC’ doesn’t mean ‘no PC’, but instead it means ’not only PC’ in that people use multiple devices including desktops and/or laptops throughout their day and that they need access to their “stuff” on all their devices in a synchronized manner. This means that business apps and data are available in the most...
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There has been some interesting conversations recently at both BriForum and in the blogosphere about VDI and Security, the premise being that VDI is not more secure than other ways of running Microsoft Windows. I want to address that comment head on and unequivocally state that VDI has quite a few security benefits. Now, let me state up front that VDI does not make the Windows OS more secure, nor is it a panacea for every possible security threat in today’s world of interconnected systems. However, it is well known that security is best addressed with multiple layers of protection with multiple defenses and VDI is one such technology. In particular it improves security by enabling better isolation and controls over the environment in...
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Today we announced that VMware has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Wanova. This acquisition represents a very exciting and strategic addition to the VMware End-User Computing product portfolio. The combination of VMware View and Wanova Mirage is an industry first pairing that dramatically redefines the VDI market – no longer is the market restricted to virtual desktops, but central image management operational benefits can be extended to more types of client end point systems – including physical, virtual, tethered desktops and roaming laptops (Mac and PC). While you can read more about the business side of this acquisition in our announcement , this blog will take a deeper look at the technology behind the deal and what it...
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Persona management refers to technologies that isolate aspects of an individual user’s personal settings or customizations from the base operating system image. We find user persona technologies to be a widely misunderstood topic, as there are a variety of approaches and categories for these solutions and the various categories serve different purposes and solve different problems for customers. With the arrival of VMware View 5 and our View Persona Management functionality, I thought I would take this opportunity to call out the various categories of persona management technology and what each of them does. Persona management is definitely not one size fits all! The most basic form of persona management is simple file/folder redirection. Take the Microsoft Windows “My Documents” folder and...
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During my session, Session EUC1881, “VMware End-User Computing 2013 and Beyond” at VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas , I will be discussing VMware’s vision for the post-PC era and will preview and demonstrate two new end-user computing technologies we are excited about — code named Projects AppBlast and Octopus. These technologies advance the company’s vision for enabling universal application and data delivery for the post-PC era. Project AppBlastProject AppBlast will provide the universal delivery of any application, including Windows-based applications, to any off-the-shelf browser or device supporting HTML 5, enabling instant remote access to non-HTML based applications. We expect it to become a key part of our EUC platform vision, enabling delivery of all forms of applications from your personal, private...
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In my October blog post A Simple Experiment , I discussed the great WAN experience that we demonstrated at VMworld Europe using View and PCoIP. What I didn’t talk a lot about was that we weren’t using an off the shelf VPN for the connection back to the US, we were actually using an early version of the View Security Server that was enhanced with native PCoIP support over UDP. VPNs that tunnel UDP over TCP/IP will be far less effective at delivering the rich user experience that PCoIP is capable of when compared to approaches that preserve the protocol control of native UDP. Mark Benson described our Security Server architecture in his posting Secure Remote Access with View and PCoIP ....
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