Virtual desktop market to surpass $65bn

By Alex Kayle, Senior portals journalist

Johannesburg, 27 Mar 2009

The worldwide hosted virtual desktop (HVD) market will accelerate to 49 million units by 2013, up from more than 500 000 units in 2009, according to global research firm, Gartner.

Worldwide HVD revenue will grow from about $1.3 billion to $1.5 billion in 2009, which is less than 1% of the worldwide professional PC market, to $65.7 billion in 2013, which will be equal to more than 40% of the worldwide professional PC market.

Annette Jump, research director at Gartner, warns: “PC vendors must prepare for the growth in demand for this client computing architecture by adjusting sales strategies and compensation models, or they risk losing expenditure share with business customers.”

Jump continues: “Distributed computing has been the dominant client computing architecture for the past 15 to 20 years, but a number of changes in the way users can access applications and client computing capabilities are bringing a number of alternative architectures to the fore.”

Brian Gammage, VP and Gartner fellow, notes: “Hosted virtual desktops are currently the most visible of these alternative architectures and HVD adoption is likely to be rapid during the next three to five years, particularly in mature markets where existing data centre and network infrastructures will be used to offset the cost of entry.”

Gartner says this means there will be a major impact on the PC industry, where businesses that previously purchased high volumes of desktop PCs on a regular basis will now look to replace these with less-expensive devices and replace them less frequently. However, Gartner points out that while PC hardware expenditure will fall, businesses will require more servers, network bandwidth and software to support the new architectures.

Gartner estimates approximately 15% of current worldwide traditional professional desktop PCs will migrate to HVDs by 2014, equal to about 66 million connected devices. The US will reach double that of the worldwide average, with over 18 million connected devices. After an initial slow start, the HVD market will rally in 2010 and 2011.

The current players in the HVD market mainly come from thin-client and virtualisation IT areas. Gartner expects the HVD market will be heavily influenced by market leader VMware by 2012, and also predicts Microsoft will become an HVD supplier in the next 18 to 24 months, through its partnership with Citrix.