Executive Viewpoint: Mike Palin, Leostream

By Michael Palin
published: Monday, January 05 2009

According to data from researchers at Gartner Group, the number of virtualized PCs is expected to grow from less than 5 million in 2007 to 660 million by 2011. While the industry has been anticipating strong growth for some time now, many have found this projection to be surprisingly aggressive - especially coming from a firm like Gartner, which tends to be fairly measured in its market-growth analysis.

While I was delighted with this prediction (since this is my market!), it didn't come as a complete shock to me. Currently, my company's technology is used in virtual desktop deployments by more that 150 large enterprises involved in financial services, healthcare, government and other sectors. We have seen the reason for Gartner's optimism up close - and in the large-enterprise market, desktop virtualization is delivering one of those "no brainer" value propositions that is causing the market to accelerate rapidly.

We are especially tuned into the large-enterprise market because our connection broker technology is designed specifically for large-scale desktop virtualization deployments. While many vendors offer connection brokers as part of proprietary virtualization products and packages, we have seen a market appreciation for vendor-independent, best-of-breed technology that can fit into existing security and IT infrastructures and prevent the pitfalls of "vendor lock-in."  For large enterprises, this is critical for protecting the return on existing IT investment, and also in accommodating future expansion and technology adoption.

Much of Gartner's predicted growth will come from this large-enterprise market. Even in a down economy, we are seeing large enterprises aggressively move forward with desktop virtualization projects in 2009. The reason for this is simple:  just like with server virtualization, desktop virtualization reduces costs and improves productivity and security - which is the perfect "trifecta" for IT projects during a down economy.

And, as part of these deployments, we are seeing some interesting industry trends emerge, especially in the context of large and complex projects. For these deployments, "all in one" solutions are not mapping well to the real-world requirements of the enterprise. Virtualization, like virtually all IT infrastructure technologies before it, needs to "play well with others" to accommodate the inescapably heterogeneous nature of IT environments. As a result, we are seeing large enterprises gravitate toward best-of-breed, open solutions as they move to the virtualized future.

We have also seen how the humble connection broker - a piece of technology that amounts to just 5-10 percent of the cost of a desktop virtualization project - is often the component that brings large scale desktop virtualization projects to their knees. This is due to enterprises underestimating the complexity of connecting end-users to desktops within the context of the existing IT environment and its associated policies and compliance requirements. As the market accelerates, we anticipate the connection broker becoming one of the focal points of desktop virtualization.

In short, while the extent of Gartner's predictions may have been surprising, we do anticipate strong growth because we have already witnessed a burst of desktop virtualization adoption in large enterprises. In the coming years, this market will continue to rapidly expand, while also causing a trickle-down effect in the mid-market that will move desktop virtualization from the early adopter stage to mainstream.

Leostream

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