2010: Watershed Year for VDI?

In a new study of 1,500 IT executives and virtualization gurus scheduled to be released this week, VDI is all about a positive user experience, reducing TCO, and finding management products that can look into what's going on with VDI networks. And oh, by the way, most survey respondents agreed that 2010 will be a "watershed year" for VDI. The survey was done by Xangati, which specializes in providing visibility into physical and virtual infrastructures.

The first question to invoke the user experience was "What factors were/will be evaluated to determine success of the VDI pilot?" "End-user experience/satisfaction" topped this list of answers, with an 83 percent response rate among the IT execs. Finishing second at 71.6 percent was "Critical business apps worked as expected."

In response to a query asking "Please rank these network considerations for VDI in order of importance," an overwhelming 67.8 percent selected as their answer "Latency/user experience." The next most popular response "Implementation and support costs," was registered by 28.7 percent of respondents.

When asked "Which of these functions do you expect a management solution to provide in your VDI deployments," 62.7 percent replied "Assess what is adversely affecting end-user experience," followed by 54 percent, who said "Tell me what isn't working." For more on VDI management, check out the Desktop Virtualization category in the 2010 Virtualization Review Buyer's Guide (registration required). Some products to consider there include SysTrack Virtual Machine Planner from Lakeside Software, and Thin Desktop from ThinLaunch Software.

With so many responses targeting a positive user experience, it seemed somewhat ironic that when this group responded to a question asking "What do you see as likely obstacles to a full scale VDI deployment?," the most common answer was "Business/end-user resistance to giving up existing desktops." Which provokes me to ask, "What else is new?" End users have fought every major change that has ever come down the new technology pike, only to end up praising the new products they previously rejected.

That attitude ties in with another survey question that asked "Which parts of your organization are actively involved in the VDI implementation?" Not too many people would be surprised to learn that even though the focus of so many survey responses was on the VDI user experience, the least popular answer here was "Line of business." It's all about aligning business requirements with technology resources, right?

Finally, 65.7 percent of survey respondents agreed that 2010 is the "watershed year" for VDI. I can think of a few vendors who would like that to be the case.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 02/11/2010 at 12:48 PM