2010 Prediction: Harry Ruda, Desktone

By Harry Ruda
published: Wednesday, December 02 2009

2010 Brings Adoption of Desktops as a Service

Making predictions—particularly ones that come to pass—is never easy.  Predicting technology adoption trends in the midst of economic uncertainties can be even more challenging.  But even if I can’t foresee when the economy is going to finally stabilize, there is one thing I can be certain of:  desktops as a service® (or DaaS®) will see end-customer adoption in 2010.

The idea that DaaS—cloud-hosted virtual desktops delivered as a subscription service—will help usher in a new era of client computing is not new.  In fact, Gartner’s predictions for 2009 noted that “IT shops will use DaaS as a way to reduce their investment in supporting PCs that are rapidly becoming non-strategic.”  At the time, Gartner envisaged that, by 2011, at least five major service providers would be offering DaaS as an economical way to provide scalable, flexible desktops.

Gartner was right—more right than they may have realized.  This year—two years ahead of Gartner’s schedule—five service providers announced DaaS services: IBM and ICC Global Hosting in North America, SCC in Europe, and SoftBank Telecom and Marubeni Corporation in Japan.

Why is this happening now?  Simply put, organizations need to adopt solutions that will save them money and enable greater flexibility.  That’s why, despite or maybe even because of this economy, interest in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and cloud computing remain strong.  And DaaS enables companies to realize the cost savings and efficiency benefits of VDI without upfront capital expenditure, and without building out and maintaining VDI environments themselves, by leveraging the cloud.

Service providers, like the ones mentioned above and many others that have yet to go public with their offerings, are recognizing the opportunity and business value in DaaS.  They can provide a high-margin, value-added service that enterprises want but aren’t equipped to implement—at a compelling price point.  And, not only can service providers take advantage of their existing assets, like data center space, connectivity and power, they can maximize utilization of these assets when creating their DaaS infrastructure, yielding a much higher ROI.

Leading technology vendors are also seeing the value in DaaS and are adapting their solutions to enhance DaaS implementations.  For instance, NetApp recently announced that it is integrating its storage solutions with the Desktone-powered DaaS platform to enable more efficient storage for cloud-based hosted virtual desktop infrastructures.  And Wyse Technology worked with Desktone to bring rich multimedia capabilities to hosted virtual desktops.  In 2010, we’ll continue to see more vendors porting their technologies to DaaS, enabling service providers to offer increasingly compelling DaaS solutions to enterprises and SMB organizations.

Next year, DaaS will see strong initial traction with customers, and by the end of 2010—as early customer deployments validate the benefits of DaaS— the rest of the market will follow.  As far as predictions go, this is one you can count on.