VDI’s Nomenclature Wormhole
Is virtualization confusing to newcomers to the
topic? You bet. Could certain aspects of it easily
be made less confusing? Absolutely. One of them
is the nomenclature surrounding VDI.
Nomenclature wars are mostly border skirmishes
that take place between vendors trying to stake
out conceptual territory in emerging markets.
Vendors hope their terminology will catch on because
if it does, presto, the best kind of viral marketing
gets jumpstarted. But you can also see it happening
elsewhere. For example, as mentioned in an earlier
blog, Forrester and Gartner both have their own
terms for VDI: hosted desktop virtualization and
server-based client virtualization, respectively.
There are plenty of other terms out there as
well such as "centralized desktop virtualization"
or the Citrix
usage "desktop virtualization." But you might
be thinking: so what if there are 10 different
terms for VDI floating around out there? The problem
is that confusion helps no one: vendors, partners,
customers and prospective buyers with this latter
category being especially affected. In due course,
eventually the market muddles through and sorts
all this out even though it's usually not a
particularly smooth or easy process. In the meantime,
there's little practically that can be done to
solve this particular semantic quagmire (aside
from editors like myself grousing in blogs).
Posted by Tom Valovic on 12/01/2008 at 12:49 PM