Will 2011 be the year that desktop virtualisation finally takes off? The signs from the Irish market appear to be encouraging with the results of a survey conducted for Citrix distributor Data Solutions, The results reveal that 30% of Irish organisations plan to deploy desktop virtualisation and almost two-thirds of that number were going to invest in a desktop virtualisation project this year.
Admittedly, that’s not a massive number. When you break those figures down, you’re talking about 20% of Irish organisations planning to deploy a desktop virtualisation project in 2011, but that’s still pretty significant. Looking at the market from a global perspective, Gartner has predicted the worldwide hosted virtual desktop market will increase in value from $1.5bn in 2009 to $65.7bn in 2013, equivalent to around 40% of the worldwide professional PC market, surging from 500,000 units two years ago to 49 million in 2013.
According to the Data Solutions survey, the main reason advanced for deploying desktop virtualisation was the long term measurable cost savings it could deliver and the efficiencies it brought to the overall organisation. Another big driver is the migration to Windows 7 with a number of companies seeing desktop virtualisation as a way to reduce migration costs and the implementation process.
Desktop virtualisation is a pretty wide-ranging term. Perhaps the most common form of desktop virtualisation to date is the hosted shared desktop model, primarily because it’s the cheapest and does the job for the vast majority of users. As Francis O’Haire, technical director at Data Solutions says, a hosted shared desktop model is likely to be suitable for 80% or 90% of users in an organisation who are defined as “task workers.” These types of employees typically may only need access to a handful of applications plus e-mail, so the hosted shared desktop makes sense for them.
Sticking it out
From the company’s point of view, it still gains the benefits of centralised patching, management, updating, anti-virus and deployment from a single instance of the desktop. Jimmy Kehoe, director of sales and marketing at Datapac, who joined the reseller from VMWare, makes the point that the type of desktop virtualisation chosen will be dependent on the customer requirement, what it is trying to do and what technology it already has in-house. For those customers that have already implemented a virtualised environment using VMWare, for example, the business case for sticking with the vendor when it comes to the desktop probably makes good sense.
He suggests that the majority of those Irish CIOs planning to deploy some form of virtualisation in 2011 are likely to be thinking of production deployments of shared hosted desktops. Eddie O’Rourke, sales director at Novosco, commented that due to the emphasis in most IT departments shifting to cutting costs, users are having “to bend the knee at the altar of cost reduction.” What this means is that the shared desktop experience, if it can be implemented for the vast majority of users in an organisation, can dramatically reduce costs. While some may feel the number of power users that can justify access to a virtual desktop that is customised could be as high as 10% or so, O’Rourke maintains that by forcing users to justify themselves and challenging them, it is possible to reduce this number to 5%.
Andrew Miller, head of sales and marketing at Unity Technology Solutions adds that many organisations already have shared hosted desktops through their use of Citrix XenApp or Microsoft Terminal Services. “We’ve seen very few customers who need a majority of their estate to be VDI. For most organisations, desktop virtualisation has just crystalised something that they already had.”
Cost efficient
Niall Gilmore, Citrix country manager, agrees that “one size does not fit all” and suggests that multiple delivery mechanisms for desktop virtualisation ranging from the shared hosted model to VDI, streaming and type 1 hypervisor on a chip (also known as ‘bare metal’) will give the best return on investment. He disputes the notion that cost reduction is the only major contributor to companies taking an interest in desktop virtualisation, citing polling by Citrix which found a third of customers identified cost reduction as a big factor for taking the plunge, but the next most popular reason was business agility.
With Windows 7 migration proving to be a significant factor, as many businesses face the prospect of buying new hardware to run the Microsoft OS, a number are looking at desktop virtualisation as a way to make the process less costly and more efficient to deploy and administer. O’Haire says people should ask themselves what they are trying to achieve from moving to Windows 7. Citrix technology can give users a shared hosted desktop that looks exactly like Windows 7 and that should suffice because, for many users, the desktop “is just a portal to get to their applications, a start button.”
As O’Rourke at Novosco puts it, for the majority of these types of users there is little difference between an OS and software installed natively on their desktop and a shared hosted desktop. But he is not convinced that IT managers are wholehearted in their embrace of desktop virtualisation. While IT departments know they can virtualise their servers, they might find the desktop virtualisation process complex in terms of how applications are delivered and in deciding what kind of desktop virtualisation is appropriate for the business. He describes it as “understanding the use case.”
And when confronted with a choice between more of the same or potentially more upfront capital expenditure on desktop virtualisation to save costs over a five to ten year period, O’Rourke believes IT managers take a step back from the decision. “Some of them take the ‘better the devil I know’ approach. This maybe the last time they do a hardware refresh, but they’re going to do it. There’s also another category, inertia. Can they sweat the asset a bit longer, save more money for the business and give themselves more time?”
Migration is the word
Ronald Dockery, client business manager at Microsoft Ireland, understandably places Windows 7 migration high on the list of factors driving the desktop virtualisation trend. He says it brings greater flexibility to working practices and reduces costs. Desktop virtualisation is a bridge between what the business wants and what IT wants, he argues, and serves as a great way of adopting new technology. Gilmore at Citrix maintains that it’s possible for companies to move to Windows 7 without having to change their hardware.
“You don’t have to go out and buy new hardware if you want to refresh the operating system,” he stated. And with virtualised approach, it’s possible to move to Windows 7 in less than 30 seconds. In addition, it helps promote the green agenda because energy costs can be dramatically reduced.
Complete Agility
Perhaps one of the most interesting trends driving businesses to consider implementing a desktop virtualisation strategy is “consumerisation.” As Miller at Unity puts it, many people have much better devices at home than in the office and are often frustrated when they come into work. This can it make it very hard to retain people. In Unity’s case, for example, the majority of its technical employees use Macs. With desktop virtualisation, they can connect to the company network and run their office experience on the device they want to use.
Gilmore quotes research that 58% of Irish employees use other devices in their daily lives and the days of working on a company’s PC exclusively “are numbered.” And as Kehoe points out, there’s nothing to beat the wow factor of demonstrating Windows 7 on an iPad to prospective customers. Both Citrix and VMWare have clients for the iPad. “It’s giving them complete agility, they can access their desktop on an iPad or any other device and they can access any application anywhere.”
Driving Virtualisation
Ian Moore, country manager at VMWare Ireland, says that his company’s iPad client also includes the ability to use the Apple device’s native gesturing on the desktop it accesses. He disagrees with many of the others when he argues that it’s not Windows 7 that’s driving desktop virtualisation in 2011 but the iPad and Android devices which he claims are igniting people’s imaginations and are often being used by executives or power users rather than task workers.
Because of its strong installed base in the virtualised server space, a lot of VMWare’s focus is on helping customers to get more out of that infrastructure with the desktop, particularly in delivering the desktop as a service. “Existing customers are used to our bulletproof hypervisor,” Moore says, “and it’s about how to improve the experience from the user’s perspective.” Like O’Rourke at Novosco, he also emphasises the importance of the “use case” for the technology.
Opinion is divided over how effective VMWare is proving to be in the desktop virtualisation space. Kehoe at Datapac says it is “aggressively promoting its solutions” and will continue to be strong but Citrix and Microsoft, through their V-Alliance, are doing a lot of joint marketing and engagement and are likely to get stronger. O’Haire says VMWare’s View solution only addresses a small portion of the overall desktop virtualisation with its hosted virtual machine desktop. By contrast, the Citrix/Microsoft approach offers customers choices from a hosted shared desktop to a hosted virtual machine desktop or streaming.
Dominant voice
O’Rourke believes Citrix and Microsoft’s V-Alliance is “the dominant voice” in the conversation around desktop virtualisation. “We’re not seeing VMWare turning up,” he claims. With Microsoft owning the operating system in most cases at the server and desktop level as well as Office and SQL, a number of customers will ask how far they can go wrong by betting on an alliance that “covers off 80% of the technology they use. That’s why they’re ahead in desktop virtualisation,” he argues.
Miller agrees the Citrix model is probably more mature at the desktop side of things. “In our experience it’s an area where Citrix has definitely got a lead,” he says, although customers that have made a substantial investment in server virtualisation with VMWare are likely to be predisposed towards View. He says the V-Alliance is “very positive in terms of dispelling confusion and allows joined up thinking to happen.” Gimore claims Citrix’s partnership on the ground in Ireland has “never been better,” describing it as “a cohesive effort.”
He reveals that at one recent V-Alliance event one of the attendees told him he couldn’t tell who the Microsoft person was making the presentation and which of them was from Citrix. Having a unified message gives clients a measure of reassurance.
Well Equipped
Kehoe is keen to stress that all the vendors are happy for partners to “eat their own dog food” when it comes to desktop virtualisation by encouraging them to use the technology themselves, as it makes it easier for them to go out and talk about it in the market. As well as free licences, “there are a huge amount of tools from Citrix, Microsoft and VMware to demonstrate this technology,” he contends. And it makes good financial sense for partners to become involved in desktop virtualisation projects.
While Datapac might get a 5 to 10% margin on selling a PC, the margin is “much richer” for desktop virtualisation because it can be quite complex and requires more support and it can also lead to a closer relationship with the customer. So will 2011 be the year of desktop virtualisation? Dockery at Microsoft states that he thinks it will be, as companies are moving to desktop as a service, almost like electricity. While he might not agree that this is the year, Miller is pretty sure the desktop as a service trend is on the horizon. He maintains that, “the desktop has gone from a device on the network to a service you can provide to users.”
The company saw a number of projects last year and it expects some to go live this year, early adopters are starting to go in, usually with a hosted managed solution. Miller describes it as a “natural progression in how the desktop is delivered.” With software vendors developing licensing programmes to allow for the shift to the OpEx model, he thinks the take up of desktop as a service “will rocket and allow desktop projects to really kick off.”
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