In this blog I look beyond the obvious and try to find out why people and companies do what they do - and what it means for the rest of us. 
ESG recently published a research brief on the topic titled “Hosted Virtual Desktops Bring PCs to the Cloud”, and it contains piles of interesting nuggets. Here are a few:
ESG’s survey of 480 North American and Western European IT professionals on the topic of desktop virtualization— technology in which a user’s entire desktop environment, including the operating system, applications, data, and user preferences, is hosted and managed in a central data center and accessed remotely by users—revealed significant early use of, as well as interest in, these solutions. In fact, almost 30% of respondents said their organization either already deployed a desktop virtualization solution or planned to do so within the next 12 months, while an additional 31% had no imminent plans to roll out virtual desktops, but would consider it. Similarly, in two additional surveys, 23% of medium-size businesses (i.e., 100 to 999 employees) and 24% of enterprise-class businesses (i.e., 1,000 or more employees) cited “desktop virtualization/thin client initiative” as one of the top IT initiatives that would shape infrastructure purchasing decisions over the next 12-24 months.
So what is the appeal of desktop virtualization? By consolidating desktop images in a secure location and streaming them to end-point devices, these solutions allow IT staffs to improve service levels and satisfy regulatory compliance and information security requirements—all while maintaining a seamless end-user computing experience. However, the most appealing attribute of virtual desktops to a majority of organizations is the potential reduction of desktop operational costs. This is not surprising in light of the global economic climate over the last year, which has subjected IT budgets to unprecedented levels of belt-tightening. Indeed, according to ESG’s 2009 Data Center Spending Intentions Survey, 62% of respondents believe that a reduction in operational costs will be one of the key considerations in justifying IT investments to business management teams over the next two years.
How can this data be interpreted? Clearly, organizations with larger, more complex, and more labor-intensive PC environments—as measured by the number of FTEs responsible for managing PCs and other various end-point devices— displayed a greater willingness to off-load either some or all of their virtual desktops, and the subsequent responsibilities associated with managing them, to a third-party provider. This has obvious capital and operational expense reduction implications: in addition to minimizing the amount of onsite equipment necessary to support virtual desktops, at least some of the dedicated PC FTEs could be redeployed to more strategic endeavors. On the other hand, the hours consumed managing end-point devices are more indicative of the sophistication of an organization’s PC environment in terms of applications, operating systems, and device types. The fact that the majority of respondents (65%) that spend at least 13 hours per client access device for annual maintenance would consider hosted virtual desktops in some form could signify that organizations recognize that there are user groups whose needs exceed the current skill sets of the support staff. The takeaway from these data points is that both the size and complexity of PC environments are key drivers of interest levels in hosted virtual desktops.
Perhaps one of the most interesting nuggets for those who plan to make their fortunes in the cloud is that among the early, planned, and potential adopters of desktop virtualization in ESG’s survey, more than half of these respondents indicated they would be amenable to a hosted virtual desktop solution. Wow.
It makes sense according to my previous theories on apps in the cloud – the bandwidth isn’t as much an issue as it’s only shipping an image normally, and the universal connectivity it provides makes laptop explosions a non-issue. The other obvious value is that IT can manage it – which by default means help desk supporting us from helping ourselves to stupid things will benefit.
Interesting stuff.
Off to London to do a little biz and then watch the Pats squish the Bucs, then I’ll see you in Frankfurt for a strudel and some nice apple wine.
Related posts:
- Lessons Learned at CIO Finance Summit
- Enterprise Search Still Sucks…..
- Virtual Private Clouds
- Where Is The IT Spending Going To Happen in 2010?
- Reverse Cloud Economics
Tags: Cloud, desktop virtualization, ESG Research, VDI
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What makes desktop virtualization into a “Cloud”? You missed this point in your post (and the research?). Not all hosting == cloud!
What is the elastic demand for virtual desktops?
i.e. is there a global distribution of users in different timezones?
Can a virtual desktop be provisioned “on demand”?
Is there billing integration such that I only get billed for the actual virtual desktop usage?
If not, this is not a “cloud” it’s just the hosting capability which is already available. I am surprised that ESG is one of many folks abusing the cloud term without a clear understanding of the difference.
– mark
——Markster, my Sun/Oracle/Who knows friend, hosting is a cloud service. There are LOTS of cloud services. Your myopic definition should not preclude others. Last Iooked Sun wasn’t in charge of symantec’s for, well, anything anymore. The point is that yes – HOSTING – virtual desktops is a nice cloudy application – nothing more, nothing less. Stop yelling at me, yell at Larry. – Steve
I think you are doing your customers and the industry a disservice by using the cloud label so broadly. This what vendors do when they want to sell their current product lines as “clouds”.
You have the opportunity to clarify things here by being a little more myopic and focused on what value cloud has that they haven’t been able to achieve with traditional hosting.
It’s a new model for delivering IT services, so calling these old models clouds is misguided and misleading. Just my opinion, not Larry’s…
I find it interesting to observe the growing interesting desktop virtualization. I noticed that you didn’t include the words thin client, but once or twice, in your posting, and probably for good reason. We have come along way since the day of the thin client X Terminal. At Tektronix we sold thousands of X Terminals. Back then it too was very much about the cost of ownership argument, comparing the administrative cost of a personal computer to that of a thin client. Many of these devices were sold to banks and used as teller stations. They were also used by customer server representatives or in information kiosks. But in general, the end user experience wasn’t rich. In fact, the applications were narrowly scoped and there were very few power users. I remember being forced to eat our own dog food, that is, to use X Terminals internally to demonstrate to ourselves and to the world that it was possible and perhaps, downright enjoyable to use X Terminals for office applications. We scrambled to find office tools. We found a few and they were very primitive. It was kind of like going from a steak diet to eating cardboard and smiling while you do it. We later introduced a package called WinDD, or Windows Distributed Desktop, that made use of Citrix’ ICA protocol to deliver native Windows Applications to the desktop. A huge step in the right direction but the latencies for many applications left us wanting and waiting. Over time, as PCs became less expensive, as remote management tools became more prevalent, and other devices became available that weren’t exactly thin but weren’t fat either, the market for X terminals showed wear.
Desktop Virtualization while realizing some of the same benefits enjoyed by X Terminals should be so much richer. Sure you get the advantages of central or even better, third party provider administration. The related savings are very important, especially when things are tight. However, the user experience has dramatically improved. Baseline processors, memory, networking bandwidth, disk speeds have all evolved and improved (granted applications are more demanding too). The user experience has been enhanced to support video and audio. The desktop, or display device can be thin or it can be thick, depending upon the application and the device I’m using. X Terminals assumed that I didn’t go anywhere, I stayed put. For that matter, so do most desktop PCs. In this new world, my user experience should follow me, the mobile me. I no longer need a dedicated desktop. I don’t even need a dedicated office. In fact, my user experience should adjust to the device I’m presently tagged to. It might be a laptop, it might be a dedicated thin client device in a shared office environment, and it might possibly even be my PDA down the road. And for each of these environments, there is intelligence that dictates how much processing is done at my fingertips, how much is done in my data center, and how much is done in the cloud. As a user, I don’t even need to know where the processing is being done. While it’s great that IT and the business can realize some significant savings, what’s in for users isn’t too shabby either.
Is there billing integration such that I only get billed for the actual virtual desktop usage?
That depends on what you mean by virtual desktop usage. There have long been app’s capable of supporting “time share” services, but you probably mean more along the lines of what “images” are served? If you can be more specific perhaps I can help. Cheers.