I've read a few articles that are declaring this the year when it changes. Desktops will wither and centralized virtualization solutions will begin to dominate. My take? Not so fast.
I'm certain large corporations that maintain large pools of computers that serve staff who all do extremely similar tasks will benefit from Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). However, we still need to remember that the marketplace is dominated by Small and Medium Businesses (SMB).
SMBs don't normally have that large of IT staff so they do not have a large amount of free time to experiment. While we always hope folks are researching things on nights and weekends and trying to get better and put in the extra time, the reality is that a lot of that time is already occupied by off hours projects and service and maintenance work on existing systems.
After the last year, budgets are still under a lot of pressure so they likely do not have a lot of free capital to try something new. IT Managers will want to pursue a tried and true course with their precious budget dollars. It is expensive to move everything to a centralized system. And when you do, you better have a hot option for redundancy. Because when a single desktop fails, that only affects one user - when a VDI server fails dozens of users are idle. And that adds up to a lot of lost productivity very quickly, even in an SMB.
Third, SMBs do not typically have large staffs doing identical tasks. In smaller organizations, folks tend to wear a lot of hats. It's harder to get your bang for the buck on highly customized Virtual Desktops. I haven't even mentioned the challenges with outside and roaming employees who need to take data with them. Classically, VDI isn't there for them yet without adding more complexity to their lives.
So, I think it will grow this year and the technology will get better and cheaper. But we are still a long way from ubiquitous VDI throughout SMBs.
I'm certain large corporations that maintain large pools of computers that serve staff who all do extremely similar tasks will benefit from Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). However, we still need to remember that the marketplace is dominated by Small and Medium Businesses (SMB).
SMBs don't normally have that large of IT staff so they do not have a large amount of free time to experiment. While we always hope folks are researching things on nights and weekends and trying to get better and put in the extra time, the reality is that a lot of that time is already occupied by off hours projects and service and maintenance work on existing systems.
After the last year, budgets are still under a lot of pressure so they likely do not have a lot of free capital to try something new. IT Managers will want to pursue a tried and true course with their precious budget dollars. It is expensive to move everything to a centralized system. And when you do, you better have a hot option for redundancy. Because when a single desktop fails, that only affects one user - when a VDI server fails dozens of users are idle. And that adds up to a lot of lost productivity very quickly, even in an SMB.
Third, SMBs do not typically have large staffs doing identical tasks. In smaller organizations, folks tend to wear a lot of hats. It's harder to get your bang for the buck on highly customized Virtual Desktops. I haven't even mentioned the challenges with outside and roaming employees who need to take data with them. Classically, VDI isn't there for them yet without adding more complexity to their lives.
So, I think it will grow this year and the technology will get better and cheaper. But we are still a long way from ubiquitous VDI throughout SMBs.
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