For decades most businesses have accepted that every employee needs a PC with its own operating system and its own applications, all sitting on its own hard drive.
But all that could be about to end if the virtualisation trend sweeping through data centres hits desktops with the same force.
Desktop virtualisation is in effect a rebadging of client computing. This model - dominated by Citrix -- has worked best in enterprises with large desktop fleets or companies with many small offices which would require a lot of manpower to provide IT support.
New technology from VMWare, Wyse and Microsoft, and the emergence of cloud computing, which could also be described as a client computing model, has reintroduced the concept to businesses that fall outside those categories in the small to medium business market.
There are several ways to virtualise a desktop, from applications through to the whole operating system. Each method has advantages and disadvantages, but a common goal is to reduce a major cost to businesses of all sizes: desktop maintenance.
Maintenance can chew up an enormous amount of the average IT budget. Patching and updating every anti-virus program, operating system and applications on every PC in an office takes a lot of effort if done manually or a lot of bandwidth if done remotely using automation tools like Kaseya or Hounddog.
Virtualising desktops allows you to perform all maintenance in the data centre itself, either to a single image or multiple images, and the machine used by the end-user in effect becomes a terminal.
"The desktop should just be a videocard and it's just playing what's happening somewhere else," says Wyse's Ward Nash (pictured).
But desktop virtualisation doesn't necessarily mean the world is moving back to mainframes and terminals just yet. Some vendors give you the option of virtualising certain applications rather than the whole machine.
Employees can use a standard PC, either at work or from home.
Controlling applications from the data centre is also more secure and makes it easier to store and manage data.
It also increases the level of control over what users do with their machines and the applications they run on them.
New security threats which combine social engineering with software hacks are easier to stop from a centralised location than on every device.
Mobile workers carrying around portable devices with company secrets present another vulnerability that can be minimised through virtualisation.
If it all makes such good sense, why hasn't it happened before?
Common complaints were that dumbed-down terminals lacked essential features such as USB connectivity or sufficient bandwidth to play video and music.
These issues have been addressed in the latest terminals, and virtualisation software can also run simultaneously on a standard Windows, Mac or Linux desktop or laptop.
WAN optimisation has also come a long way.
Citrix uses branch repeaters and WAN scalers to compress traffic and cache information to assist desktop and application streaming. Virtualised operating systems mean you can run terminals with Microsoft Office, but without the maintenance overheads of a local Windows OS.
But virtualising desktops can be much more complicated - and expensive -- than virtualising the data centre. The process requires assessing and potentially upgrading the company's entire IT system, from servers through to network.
It is impossible to put a minimum cost of entry to desktop virtualisation as it depends on the current state of a company's IT infrastructure, says Michael Chanter, general manager of professional services division with Frontline, an IT services provider whose typical customer is a 1000-seat plus enterprise.
The price of admission can include virtualisation and server software, better storage and networking, as well as professional services and consulting to put it all into place.
"Some organisations will have a very well controlled environment and they can explain all the application sets and how they manage it, and a good WAN structure in place," says Chanter.
"If it were a greenfield site, for 250 seats you're starting at $100k. If you had annterprise grade SAN that was capable of delivering desktop images, you're already halfway there."
These costs can be offset by reduced storage needs and less maintenance and a lower refresh rate on PCs. Most of the savings come from PC management, says Chanter.
"The man hours to maintain a fleet of desktops is just huge. Now you go back to patching a single image of Vista, that's a fairly trivial exercise."
Virtualisation can also reduce bandwidth costs. "Think about the cost of downloading patches to every desktop to your fleet if it weren't virtualised," says Chanter.
The most important question resellers need to ask customers, says David Wakeman, product marketing manager, enterprise desktop, Australia/New Zealand, of VMWare, is where is the value in operating physical PCs versus virtual ones.
"The value of desktop virtualisation is very different to server consolidation. There's a big opportunity for resellers who can articulate which purchases will change, which processes will become easier. It's much more of a solution sell rather than a hardware sell like with server consolidation."
Client computing has made few inroads into the global market; Wyse estimates it at 6-8 percent of business PCs. But the take-up of cloud computing, from Google Apps to Salesforce, is indirectly introducing similar concepts to the SMB market.
The signs of a virtual desktop boom are mounting. Gartner and IDC recently predicted the technology would take off: in March a Gartner study said virtual desktops would soar from 500,000 units to 49 million, or 40 percent of the "global professional PC market", by 2013.
However, two years earlier Gartner had forecast a market of 660 million virtualised PCs by 2011, so although the trend is heading up it's uncertain at what rate.
A surer predictor than analysts' figures are the increasing investments of the major players in virtual desktop platforms.
IBM has tightened its relationship with thin-client expert Wyse to improve its expertise in streaming applications. IBM is selling Wyse thin-client hardware and software, shared services and streaming services.
Last year a US reseller produced the "Pano Virtual Desktop" device which has no memory, operating system, drivers or moving parts and instead connects to a virtualised server over an IP network.
Not so fast, McFly
Before we switch over to a fully virtualised world, someone first has to pay for it. Gartner predicts hosted virtual desktop revenues to climb from US$1.3 billion ($1.6 billion) in 2009 to US$65.7 billion by 2013, but these numbers would depend on a swift recovery from the global recession.
And companies need to spend serious money upfront on server and network infrastructure before their IT environment can sustain a virtualised workplace.
This is where analysts start to disagree. The shrinking IT budgets which are supposed to be pushing virtualised desktops onto the agenda (says IDC in December 2008) are also responsible for delaying the investments in the data centre needed to sustain a virtualised workplace (says Gartner in March 2009).
A trend towards virtualised desktops is good news for those who sell software, but not for those in the hardware game. A major effect of this proposed boom would be that companies will replace desktop PCs with less expensive machines and reduce their refresh cycles, says Gartner.
Resellers relying on corporate customers for large orders of desktops every three or four years might find virtualisation undercutting the business.
Virtualisation has matured to the point where customers have a range of options. The target can be an application, the desktop or the PC, and one company can use all these options on different devices.
"There's no singular model. There's a bunch of different users in every organisation - sales people with laptops, technicians running high powered workstations, accountants," says Chanter.
"Take all those pieces and work out which vendor makes sense. You can't afford to be religious, you need to understand the customer's situation."
Picking the winner
Citrix is number one by a long way in client computing, but VMWare is the vendor best associated with virtualisation thanks to its success in the server room.
VMWare's David Wakeman says server virtualisation is making people think less about replacing PCs with virtual PCs but more about a data centre as one big platform that can be carved up into desktops and servers as needed.
VMWare said it did not have any figures on how many customers of its server virtualisation software have also bought into desktop virtualisation.
However, Wakeman says that at a recent VMWare roadshow a quick survey of attendees of a seminar on desktop virtualisation - a mix of customers from the mid-market to enterprise - found that 70 percent had server virtualisation and 30 percent had no virtualisation at all.
While Citrix has a strong presence in enterprise, VMWare is setting its sights lower. Wakeman says SMBs with 150-200 seats are now thinking about desktop virtualisation.
The technology will reach even further down the scale when hosting providers start providing desktops as a service, possibly as soon as next year.
The elephant in the room is of course Microsoft. A latecomer to the party, Microsoft could use its user base to introduce quickly the concept to companies of all sizes.
Chanter believes VMWare and Citrix will lose market share to Microsoft as the market matures.
Apart from the user base, Microsoft already has agreements with enterprise in place, and there is a lot of management instrumentation already built into the stack. "Our view is that they're going to be a big player," says Chanter.
From a hardware perspective, the range of devices able to run virtualised environments is growing. Netbooks and nettops (low-powered desktops) and other mobile devices have arrived in number as internet-based services have improved.
It is easy to imagine one day a simple mobile wireless device that connects to the cloud for processing, applications and storage.
Wyse, the long-standing supplier of terminals, has already taken the nettop concept to the ultimate destination. Its terminals will run XP Pro, Linux or Windows CE, but the lightest OS is its own UNIX variant thinOS, which weighs in at just 7MB.
Wyse updates the OS by uploading a new version to an FTP site, which then automatically downloads to customers' machines.
The Wyse thin clients, which run on VIA and AMD CPUs, rely on servers to do the data processing. The Wyse range starts at $400 and the refresh rate is five to seven years, says Nash.
Slowing down that refresh rate and squeezing more longevity from a desktop fleet can justify the cost of virtualisation itself, says Chanter. "Just a pure capex biz case can be easy to achieve."
While virtualising the desktop is less straightforward, if you're already into server virtualisation the good news is you're already most of the way there from a certification perspective.
The main requirement is understanding the user issues at the desktop as opposed to managing servers, says Nash.
And the nature of the technology means a service provider will have the chance to upgrade every component of a customer's information technology environment.
"You're going from the desktop to the data centre. There's not much part of the infrastructure that you wouldn't be touching," says Chanter.
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