Desktop Virtualization

By Stephanie Jordan
in

IT investments are being made in all types of virtualization including server virtualization, application virtualization, desktop virtualization, operating system virtualization, etc. Virtualization adoption is taking place not only at the enterprise level, but also small-to-medium-size businesses (SMBs). Last month SpamTitan, a producer of email security solutions, released its global industry survey of just over 500 users of email security solutions.

The survey points to the SMB market as acknowledging that an economic dip is the best time to make innovative IT investments. According to the survey, SMBs recognize that a re-evaluation of their current email security and other office technology solutions is a worthwhile endeavor in order to optimize business operations and reduce costs. SpamTitan believes that during this economic downturn, SMBs that have the foresight to make the right type of IT investments will have a better ability to gain a competitive edge and further differentiate themselves from the industry giants.

“Tight budgets and limited resources are driving companies’ efforts to increase ROI,” says Ronan Kavanagh, SpamTitan president. “It is becoming evident that client/server virtualization and cloud computing are becoming hot topics in the industry because they allow SMBs to achieve high performance while decreasing IT overhead costs and limitations such as bandwidth and resource constraints.”

SpamTitan sees virtualization growing in adoption especially because many SMBs have remote offices and value the capability of being able to facilitate security and redundancy across sites with instant scalability, failover and load balancing and eliminating the need for hardware costs. For example, in its survey 74 percent of SMBs reported that they hope to lower PC costs with alternative technologies such as desktop virtualization.

Desktop Virtualization Adoption

Desktop virtualization is expected to grow. According to analyst group Gartner, desktop virtualization will coexist with, rather than replace, PCs and server-based computing and predicts the market will triple in size this year, and drive in the region of US$300 million in software sales. Last week saw a number of announcements in this space as vendors move toward filling this market demand. For example: Propalms, Inc., announced its plans to release Propalms VDI in Q3 of 2009. According to the company, Propalms VDI is a highly scalable virtual desktop solution capable of provisioning, managing, and brokering connections to virtual and physical machines running various client operating systems.

Also last week, AppSense, a provider of user environment management solutions for the enterprise, announced a partnership with Force 3 Inc., a supplier of IT consulting, management and sales to the U.S. federal government. The companies also revealed that a U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) agency is already using their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution to simplify workstation environment deployment and management for more than 250 client devices.

The company noted that the implementation marks an expansion of AppSense’s sales and reseller efforts into the U.S. federal government, as well as increased recognition by government agencies of the cost savings, security and flexibility benefits of virtualized desktops. “While the early adopters of VDI technology have tended to be in financial services, insurance and healthcare, we’ve seen a significant uptick in interest among government agencies,” notes Charles Sharland, CEO of AppSense. “VDI is an extremely powerful technology that saves organizations a significant amount of money and IT resources. However, users still expect personalized desktops, which only AppSense can enable in an enterprise environment. Force 3 provides exceptional services to the federal government, and we look forward to working with them, bringing our combined solution to other DoD agencies, as well as additional federal branches.”

Published June 15, 2009