Tighter Budgets to Speed Desktop Virtualisation Growth

By Greg McNevin

December 5, 2008: While it is already proving to be popular, IDC says that it expects virtualisation adoption to be accelerated further, citing budgetary pressure as the driving force.

According to a new IDC study, in 2009 IT departments will face fierce pressure to reduce costs, while IT environments simultaneously become even more complex.

Due to this and the speedy growth in mobile workers and devices, increased reliance on offshore employees, new security threats, and spiraling costs around management, support, and maintenance, the analyst firm expects firms to embrace desktop virtualisation, and in particular: virtual distributed desktops, which it says offers the core benefits of virtualisation while remaining cheap to deploy and supporting both fixed-desk and mobile workers.

IDC says that it has conducted a competitive analysis looking at both the technology features and market ecosystems of four of the leading vendors in the space, and has found that from a technological perspective RingCube offered some of the best features currently available, while VMware held the strongest marketing position and ecosystem.

Furthermore, the analysts claim that MokaFive delivered a strong product with excellent management features and Sentillion provided a solution with a high degree of security.

“Market maturity remains early for centralised virtual desktops (CVD) and desktop virtualisation in general, but greatly increased business interest is starting to drive more adoption,” says Matthew McCormack, client computing consultant for IDC's European Systems Group. “Although approaches to CVD are developing rapidly from a technological perspective, businesses will find that many vendors provide solutions that are mature enough to deploy and suitable for a variety of different business scenarios.”

McCormack adds that 2009 will be a developmental year for desktop virtualisation technology, with lots of pilot activity. Furthermore, he says that 2010 will see the technology begin to enter the mainstream.

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