Brian Gammage

Desktop virtualization has become a catch-all term for the whirlwind of technology change that’s occuring in client computing.  It seems that every supplier is selling this in some form and that every organization we talk to knows they must exploit it in the years ahead.

The growth in interest in desktop virtualization is no surprise to us at Gartner – indeed, we have had the satisfaction of seeing a steady stream of our predictions come true: virtualization is disrupting the PC industry status quo,  Microsoft has moved to permit “untethered” Windows licenses, hypervisors are set to be embedded in PCs and hosted virtual desktops are drawing mainstream interest. When we began writing about desktop virtualization in 2004, established vendors and external commentators looked at us askance (although many of our clients were quick to grasp the promise). Now its the hottest topic on the client computing agenda – you can expect many associated dots on our 2009 Hype Cycles for both PC technologies and Virtualization.

But the level of noise and hype is also an immense source of frustration. First because the great simplifying promise of the technology gets lost in complicated and contorted interpretations. Second because some of the noise is worse than hype – it’s misleading.

The term desktop virtualization encompasses a number of distinct technologies and market segments, but most organizations use it to describe hosted virtual desktops (HVDs). HVDs have been drawing significant interest from enterprises for over two years now and many pilot/proof of concept deployments look set to go “live” in the year ahead. But the companies selling and implementing HVDs use inconsistent language: VMware, used to call its product “VDI”, but now calls it “View”; Citrix brands its product “XenDesktop”; most other vendors use VMware’s old name, VDI. The moving parts get different names too: for example profiles, personalization and personality are all used to describe the same HVD image component.

Helping users navigate this terminology is relatively straightforward, but cutting through the fog of mis-information is harder. Future developments (like offline support) are frequently positioned as imminent, promised TCO savings are optimistically based on unrepresentative comparisons and, most troubling of all, we hear exaggerated deployment claims. Telling our clients that a prospective supplier “mis-spoke” when describing the status of their valid product has become a frequent disappointment.

So why is the industry apparently falling over its own feet in communicating the value proposition of something that the market seems so eager to buy? The answer is not based on a desire to dissimulate – it is because many of the individuals involved are struggling with the repackaging and renaming of things they’ve been successfully dealing with for years. If you’re used to selling PCs loaded up with software, selling a desktop software “bubble” plus the infrastructure to host and access it is like learning a whole new language.

Change is nearly always challenging and the PC industry is going through the biggest period of change I’ve observed in the 22 years I’ve been involved with it. As usual we (the people) are the weakest link.