Top Skills for Modern VDI Projects

Data Center Facility Technicians, Engineers, and Operators: 42%

IT Systems and/or Applications Personnel: 20%

Network and Telecommunications Personnel: 19%

See the big picture. With VDI, IT professionals must understand business challenges and how new kinds of content delivery (application virtualization and VDI) technologies can make a positive impact. For example, how will a cloud component affect a company’s competitive stance in three years? Does a certain VDI strategy fit in with the overall business needs? Even if you’re a storage architect, understanding how your part of the data center scales out into VDI is critical. Seeing the big picture often means taking off engineering blinders and thinking like a cloud and data center architect.

Develop strong interpersonal communications. Data center professionals need well-rounded communication skills which span IT teams and the organization. Those engineers who can communicate value to various business leaders are the ones who have a voice in the direction of their data center. The way to accomplish effective business-level communications is to literally, think “outside of the data center.” That means asking questions about business and user needs, economics of a VDI solution, and where IT and business plans align in the near future. If conversation is not your strong suit, you’ll have to work a bit harder, but it’s easier than it looks. Schedule brief coffee meetings with business counterparts, such as senior people in HR, operations and customer care, to find out how their user experience is lacking or vet any other concerns. Listen, have empathy, and make sure to follow back if you made any sort of promises.

Align with cloud infrastructure and applications. In VDI, it's critical to understand the complexities of applications, how they can be optimized, and what type of environment best supports them. For example, can you deliver an app or desktop via HTML5 (clientless), which can improve endpoint performance and allow for seamless use of a Google Chromebook? Or, can you deploy a cloud-based VDI instance to host the application, enabling better performance per cost metrics while still interconnecting on-premise resources? Furthermore, engineers and architects working on VDI must take the user experience into primary consideration. Remember, you’re not trying to deliver an “as good” architecture; you’re trying to give the user a superior experience through VDI.