VDI Heads for the Mainstream

VDI Adoption Gains SMB Momentum

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has a bad reputation, especially among end users who tend to view it as the IT department impinging one of their essential liberties.

And yet VDI adoption continues to grow. Large enterprises, dealing with a host of issues that range from compliance to reducing the cost of IT management, like VDI. And now a new survey of 353 IT professionals conducted by Dimension Research on behalf of Pivot3, a provider of VDI appliances, finds that small-to-medium businesses (SMB) are starting to adopt VDI for many of the same reasons.

According to Olivier Thierry, chief marketing officer for Pivot3, the rise of the BYOD phenomenon, coupled with lower total costs to implement VDI, has a lot of IT organizations taking a second look at VDI. Thierry says the total cost of implementing VDI versus the total cost of managing PC endpoints is now roughly comparable. As many IT organizations look to upgrade their IT infrastructure, they are also putting the systems and networks in place that are needed to deliver more than adequate VDI performance. From an SMB perspective, Thierry contends that an appliance approach not only makes VDI affordable, but it becomes a whole lot easier to deploy and manage.

Factor in the security benefits and more secure IT environments that are centrally managed, and it starts to make VDI look like a much more appealing alternative, says Thierry.

Not every IT organization is going to have the political capital needed to overcome resistance to VDI among end users. But for those IT organizations that can convincingly make the case, VDI is starting to make a lot more sense, especially in the grand scheme of all the other more critically important things to the business that go well beyond providing maintenance services to individual devices.