Valovic on Virtualization

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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


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