Virtual desktop growth predicted

Business demands in the face of economic pressure will increase adoption of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) technologies next year, according to a study from IDC.

At the same time, it predicted IT environments would become more complex than ever before, with more mobile workers and devices, an increased reliance on offshore employees, new security threats and spiralling costs around management, support, and maintenance.

In response, IDC found VDI technologies were creating a lot of interest for their ability to address these problems and reduce IT costs. It said one of the newest, and most promising, approaches to desktop virtualisation was the virtual distributed desktop, which offers the core benefits of virtualisation while remaining cheap to deploy and supporting both fixed-desk and mobile workers.

Matthew McCormack, a client computing consultant at IDC's European Systems Group, said the market for centralised virtual desktops (CVDs) and desktop virtualisation in general is still young, but greatly increased business interest was starting to drive more adoption.

"Although approaches to CVD are developing rapidly from a technological perspective, businesses will find that many vendors provide solutions that are mature enough to deploy and suitable for a variety of different business scenarios," he said.

McCormack forecasts that 2009 will be a developmental year for desktop virtualisation technology, with lots of pilot activity. "From 2010 we'll see the technology begin to enter the mainstream," he added.

The IDC report aims to help businesses make the right decisions about centralised virtual desktops (CVDs) with a competitive analysis of both the technology features and market ecosystems of four of the leading vendors in the space.

Overall, it found that, from a technological perspective RingCube, offered some of the best features currently available, while VMware held the strongest marketing position and ecosystem. MokaFive delivered a strong product with excellent management features and Sentillion provided a system with a high degree of security.