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Amerisure ditches its PCs, goes all virtual – CIO.de

With the emergence of various technologies that change the way OS images and apps are delivered to users, and allow desktops to be accessed from multiple devices, the definitions of different types of desktop and application virtualization are shifting.

“I’m of the opinion that we’re going to remove the word ‘virtual’ from desktops altogether,” says Burton Group analyst Chris Wolf. “Some form of virtualization is going to be implied in the delivery. We’ll get to a point where you don’t say the desktop is virtualized — it’s just implied.”

Wilson got rid of all 800 Amerisure PCs within a year of starting the project, replacing them with thin clients from Wyse and HP that cost about $225 each and use a fraction of the power required by typical PCs. Amerisure now has about 1,000 desktop thin clients, mostly from Wyse, including ones for conference rooms and other shared spaces. The company also has 120 laptop thin clients, mostly from HP.

In the data center, Wilson has 60 Dell servers running 260 VMware-based virtual machines, to host Microsoft Office, insurance claims apps and the other tools needed to make Amerisure’s business run. The user interface seen by Amerisure employees looks just like Windows XP, Wilson says.

Amerisure’s nine remote locations now contain minimal amounts of IT infrastructure, mainly just “routers and thin clients,” Wilson says. While desktop virtualization limits offline access for users, that usually isn’t a problem at Amerisure, Wilson says, because the company guarantees redundancy with T1 lines, cable Internet and wireless access.

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