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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