Webconverger is sometimes compared to "thin client" solutions like those offered by
Enterprise heavyweights like Amazon, VMWARE and Citrix solutions. In reality they
are in a different market sector called Virtual Desktop
Infrastructure.
Nonetheless, it's a good exercise to compare a Webconverger to VDI for analysis.
This is our biased view and we would love to hear your feedback.
Network fault tolerance
Offline
If Webconverger goes offline, tasks like form filling will still work. Once a
form is submitted it will retry until completed. Truthfully offline Web
apps aren't
quite there yet, though they should get better in the near future with
technologies such as service workers.
Typically when a network connection is lost VDI solutions are unusable. Furthermore in some
solutions, if the "management server" goes down, this can be another single
point of failure. BetterVDI solutions can operate without a "management server"
by caching its configuration. Webconverger actually also caches its
configuration, in case https://config.webconverger.com/ goes down.
To summarise, Webconverger wins since it is more usable and will be even more
usable in the future, offline.
Lag
Webconverger page loads will indeed suffer from a poor connection. However Web
delivery is arguably "Internet grade" than typically LAN based "premise"VDI solutions where certain
network assumptions are made and which will lag on the Internet. Once a Web
application is loaded, it's very responsive and usable.
If your end to end network is managed by yourself, then this argument is
probably moot, however this is increasingly rare as things move towards a more
cost effective "cloud hosted"VDI.
Webconverger is powered by the Web and therefore is much more robust and usable
on poor internet connections.
Scalability
VDI quickly advocate its
solution as scalable. Webconverger has been specifically designed with an
Internet connection in mind and will prove to be less of a burden on the
network.
In summary Webconverger is very bandwidth efficient.
Control and management
An important component to "mass deployment" is control and management. With
Webconverger you can streamline your business process by setting the default
application even easier than you can with VDI solutions. Just update the homepage= URL, enter a
password and any amount of machines attached to the configuration will have a
new configuration applied on reboot.
However we do not allow administrators to monitor the exact screen of the end
user as most VDI
solutions do, for privacy reasons. Some Orwellian enterprises sadly require
this invasive feature in order to be considered "enterprise grade".
To conclude, VDI has better controls,
unless you care about end user privacy, and then you will want Webconverger.
Input & Output devices
Since Webconverger is limited to a Web browser for input and output for the end
user, we are limited typically to abstracted Javascript APIs of:
- keyboard
- mouse
- printers
- touch screens
- microphone
- camera
Truthfully the microphone and camera access via
getUserMedia
APIs are variable, and it is unlikely to work well without careful
consideration and testing of your hardware.
With VDI you typically have
complete control of all input and outputs. So you can attach anything to
your local device and you should be able to integrate it with your application
as the vendor intended. Webconverger, or rather the browser currently is unable
to support a range of devices like cash registers and smart cards which a lot
of businesses rely upon. However there is usually an out of band (usually more
expensive) alternative solution that can fulfill these use cases, such as
logging in with 2 factor authentication or standalone electronic payment
devices.
VDI wins here since it has
better device control.
Legacy support for non-Web applications
Given a legacy (Windows) application, it's not reasonably possible to run that in
a Web browser. This is definitely a strength of VDI solutions, as all sorts of odd legacy environments
can be provisioned easily.
Webconverger is waiting for corporate infrastructure to migrate to
SaaS and Web applications
at that. The reasons to migrate to Web applications are several:
- open an application to a greater Internet audience
- leverage open standards
- reduce complexity
Of course some apps just can't be migrated easily to the Web, like display
or compute intensive applications. e.g. CAD/matlab
However when applications are indeed Web applications, the Web has a good track
record of backwards compatibility. Often one reason enterprises are burdened
with odd insecure legacy platforms, is due to broken upgrade paths.
VDI is a better technology
for supporting non-Web platforms, though hopefully the Web can maybe one day
support VDIin the
browser, with projects like freerdp-webconnect which still has a long way to
go.
Hardware requirements
Webconverger runs on any PC with 1GB of RAM. Also we recently started testing
on lower cost Android 5.0 and ARM7 Raspberry PI2 devices.
Typically VDI solutions run
on PCs on top of pre-installed Windows operating systems, making it a
heavyweight stack. However there are dedicated "locked down"VDI"thin client" hardware which
can be quite inexpensive. One negative point is that this hardware is often
proprietary and there is some lock in. On the contrary system integrators
are usually better geared to supplying VDI solutions, since currently to deploy Webconverger, you
need to source the hardware yourself.
Over time browsers and the Web applications they host may ask for more and more
memory, making the base Webconverger system slower and slower. VDI solutions like Amazon
workspaces correctly argue their VDIs can be provisioned with more
memory or CPU on the server side. We would like to argue any client hardware in
our experience probably needs to be replaced every 5-10 years and that cycle
basically keeps up with Web browser and application bloat in that time.
Security
This is a complicated topic (devil is in the details!), though overall the two
approaches share a similar security model, where the application and data are
remotely hosted and not local.
Webconverger's main security strength is that it's not susceptible to key
loggers and screen grabbers like all Windows based thin client applications
tend to be. The VDI on the
server might be well managed, but usually the underlying non-dedicated clients
are poorly managed and maintained.
To summarise, assuming you are running Web applications in your business, the
Webconverger system certainly has the edge. Webconverger offers a better user
experience on a frequently unstable Internet, it's less complex and it
offers better security than the typical vulnerable thin client running on
Windows.
