2010: The year of the virtual desktop?

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 12 November 2009 00:42

IT Industry - Strategy

Citrix officials are tipping 2010 as the year of the virtual desktop. Is this wishful thinking or is it an idea whose time has come?

It's one thing for the necessary pieces to fall into place for a particular technology, but that's not sufficient to ensure widespread adoption. Citrix reckons that virtual desktop technology is now capable of delivering a user experience that's as good as native operation.

Raj Dhingra, the company's corporate vice president and general manager, desktop virtualisation, told a media briefing that desktop virtualisation is following a similar trajectory to server virtualisation. Test and pilot projects are followed by targeted use cases before mainstream adoption occurs. Eventually, it becomes the standard way of doing things.

Dhingra said desktop virtualisation is currently making the transition from targeted use cases to mainstream adoption. The current largest implementation is 20,000 seats in a school district in Florida, but he said early customers are coming back with repeat orders for three to four times as many licences as they needed for their initial projects.

For example, one financial services company has purchased 70,000 seats, and a Fortune 500 company in an unspecified industry is planning a 40,000 seat rollout.

Even if you can see the benefits of virtualisation, you probably need a trigger before you adopt it. That trigger, Dhingra suggested, is the arrival of Windows 7, which is "on the agenda of every single enterprise."

How are corporate users going to migrate to the new operating system, he asked. Will they stick with the traditional model, or will they adopt desktop virtualisation instead. Citrix officials suggest desktop virtualisation yields significant savings in ongoing support and management, as a single operating system image can serve every user. Instead of having to push patches out to thousands of PCs, they are applied to that one image in a matter of minutes.

Similarly, when the time comes for a OS upgrade there's no need to reimage every computer. Administrators merely need to create one new image. Once testing is complete, they simply change one global configuration setting to point to the new image, and the next time a user signs on they automatically get the new software without any local changes.

Another factor expected to help the adoption of virtual desktops is this week's introduction of a programme that certifies the compatibility of a wide range of products with Citrix XenDesktop. Over 10,000 products (including PCs, smartphones, printers, peripherals, security software, applications, management tools, servers, and storage units) from 200 vendors (including Apple, Dell, IBM, Intel, Lenovo, McAfee, Microsoft, NetApp, SAP, and Trend) will be included in the first wave.


Stephen Withers travelled to Budapest as the guest of Citrix.