Well as I am about to start a new job the whole concept of Employee-Provisioned hardware programs is top of mind for me at the moment. Do I want to be shackled by a corporate SOE that's years behind? I am a knowledge worker. Therefore I am attempting to start with a Mac. Thankfully the company I am starting with is open to this.

So an article "Is it time for Employee-Provisioned Hardware Programs" over at CIO got me thinking about this and virtualisation.

According to an article Gartner estimate 10 percent of companies have a bring your own notebook program and it can reduce costs by 9 to 44 percent. Yet it has not proved as successful as people might have thought, due to support and compatibility issues.

However I think one comment in the article hits it right.

There are tools for PC virtualization that will allow companies to reach out to noncompany-owned devices with full security. That market is still maturing.

The whole reason why I am confident that I can bring my own device to my organisation without it becoming a time sink for me is virtualisation. As I have been using VMware VDI for my desktop since October 07 for all local and remote business work, I just need access to a network and my VDM broker.

I am planning on getting a MacBook. Running Fusion I will be able to have the best of both worlds. I can run the corporate SOE and the IT department can maintain it. I can launch individual apps like Outlook from the SOE VM and even better with reverse association when I click on a URL in Outlook it opens my Mac browser and not IE in the VM. Could you ask for more than that? Well off-line VDI which VMware have coming real soon means that when I am flying I will be able to take my SOE and do corporate work (although this working with Fusion may be a while away).

So I say the tools are here. I will let you know how I go.