Cutting costs and simplifying application delivery are key drivers for adopting desktop virtualisation.
A third of the 200 IT decision-makers in a survey by Centrix Software said they were considering rolling out desktop virtualisation. Alongside reducing costs, cited by 79% of respondents, making things easier for users and supporting remote offices were highlighted as the biggest application delivery challenges.
Three-quarters of the respondents said they used more than one application delivery model and this was unlikely to change, even if a company did adopt virtualisation, according to Centrix.
“There are multiple ways you can deliver applications. One of the things we see particularly is that one size does not fit all,” said Lewis Gee, the vice president of sales and marketing at Centrix Software.
Although server virtualisation had become accepted, we were still at the beginning of the journey for desktop virtualisation, according to Gee. Acceptance of the cloud computing model was even further off – only 6% of respondents said they were looking cloud services to solve their application delivery requirements.
Before adopting virtualisation, or any other approach, companies must first examine their existing application models and work out the appropriate delivery models for each application.
“Companies need to look at what are they using now in their environment and that’s a real challenge. Most organisations genuinely don’t know what’s being used,” said Gee.
“Virtualisation and optimising your application delivery can create a huge amount of potential savings. But simply by looking at what you do have, you can see how much is not being used and so can cut back on the number of licences,” added Gee.
Alongside virtualisation, having centralised management of application delivery was key to keeping a lid on costs.
