2011 Prediction: Wanova

Chasing the Mobile Desktop - Taming Distributed Desktop Environments in 2011

As every IT administrator knows, managing, supporting and protecting employees' desktops and laptops can be a huge hassle. Even with management tools available, applying OS patches, application upgrades, or troubleshooting and repairingsoftware or hardware problems can be time- and labor-intensive tasks.  This challenge is exacerbated when administrators are dealing with hundreds or thousands of laptops in a distributed environment.  Desktop virtualization (DV) has made inroads in helping to alleviate the pain associated with desktop management by centralizing each desktop in the data center; however, it’s still only being deployed in very specific applications.  High cost, complexity, lack of offline support and poor performance – especially for remote end users -- are still major complaints among IT professionals.  Therefore, three trends for DV in 2011 will be the following:

Mobile Workforce:  DV solutions will need to respond to the IT challenges of managing a distributed workforce.  The trend will be for DV to expand more into laptops and the management of clients that are not always connected to the data center, and often connected over the Internet.  What is mainstream for DV today will not be sufficient to support the mobile workforce in 2011.  Analyst firm IDC, in their "Worldwide Mobile Worker 2007-2011 Forecast and Analysis” estimates that the worldwide number of mobile workers will likely increase from 758.6million in 2006, to more than 1 billion by year-end 2011.  If the functionality of DV solutions does not evolve, the needs of the enterprise will not be met.

Hybrid Approach to DV:  In 2010, DV trends were about running a solely virtual desktop in the data center.  However, in 2011, this approach has to evolve so it addresses the performance, flexibility and functionality required by the distributed enterprise.   The trend will be to manage the desktop in the cloud, but execute at the edge.   For most users, this ‘edge’ means their laptop.  Traditional VDI has exclusively decoupled the logical desktop from the physical.  In 2011, we’ll see a desktop that can be hosted on a virtual machine in the data center, and the same logical desktop will also reside and execute locally on a physical laptop, with fast transition between these two modes to meet the needs of the organization.  Doing so will reduce the cost of deployment of virtualization, improve the end user experience and reduce ITcomplexity.

Edge Devices:  A third trend will be DV’s support of edge devices such as iPads and smart phones.  DV will allow end users to access and utilize their virtual desktop from thesedevices when away from their PC, or download desktops files to the endpoint for local viewing and editing. This functionality will offer the end user tremendous flexibility while increasing productivity, and most importantly, IT administrators will be able to sleep better at night.