Tucked into an announcement made yesterday regarding the release to manufacturing of version 4.5 of App-V, Microsoft's application virtualization product (itself probably worth of a separate blog post) were some interesting and potentially useful changes being made to the standard Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop license. I'll quote them here in their entirety.

· Employee owned machines: Traditionally, computers are purchased as company assets and distributed to employees based on job function. Some companies are trialing permitting users to buy the PC of their choice with a company stipend. The changes enable early-adopter companies to let users purchase with the PC of their choice, but still perform business tasks in a secure, standard Windows Vista desktop image running in a virtual machine. IT departments can enable this scenario via VECD for $110 per PC/year.

· Contract Workers: Companies can use VECD to deploy a standard, sandboxed, Windows Vista virtual machine for use on contractor machines for $110 per PC/yr. By enabling all workers, even contractors, to work with a standard image, companies can improve productivity and reduce IT headaches by enforcing application, security, and document standards.

· Desktop-based employees who occasionally from home: VECD also enables desktop-based workers to take a local copy of their Windows Vista virtual machine to any VECD covered Windows machine at work or to take it home. VECD permits this scenario for $23 per PC /year.

I have been advocating for an approach I have dubbed "Fragile Support" for some time now, which revolves around the scenario posited in the first point: allowing employees to choose and maintain their own equipment, centered around a base stipend from the business, which can both reduce and render more consistent the company's support costs. Web-based applications and SaaS companies are two factors which are making this a reasonable approach; application virtualization is another. One of the major obstacles, however, has been licensing... corporate licensing schemes from many enterprise vendors simply don't recognize such a scenario and implicitly forbid it. For Windows, that's no longer the case.

The other clauses are also a boon to the modern enterprise, which increasingly looks to contractors and home-based workers as a means of controlling expenses. When license management and administration sucked away at the savings, these approaches were less helpful than they might have been. With Microsoft jumping on the bandwagon, other vendors are likely to follow suit, and the door opens to even greater savings from more flexible business environments.