Gartner looks for virtual desktop market to skyrocket

Gartner asserts that the fastest-growing server workload in the datacenter over the next few years is going to be the desktop.

According to the analyst firm, the hosted virtual desktop (HVD) market will accelerate through 2013, growing from 500,000 to 49 million units. And worldwide revenue will reportedly grow from about $1.3 billion in 2009 to somewhere around $65.7 billion in 2013 — or roughly from 1 to 40 percent of the worldwide professional PC market.

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The analyst firm advises PC vendors to get ready for the transition and warned that this will have a major impact on purchasing trends.

“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 enterprise customers,” said Annette Jump, research director at Gartner.

Research also shows that companies will look to replace some desktop PCs with less expensive devices and replace them less frequently, rather than continuing to purchase high volumes of desktop PCs on a regular basis. On the other hand, doing so will require purchasing more servers, network bandwidth, and software to support the new architecture.

However, Jump said that many businesses will delay these purchases until after the economy turns around.

“Despite the further improvements in performance and manageability that are expected of HVDs in 2009, the current economic downturn is expected to inhibit the adoption of HVDs in the short term because HVD deployments require large upfront investments in server and network infrastructure,” Jump said. “Because of IT budget cuts, we expect many planned HVD implementations to be delayed from 2009 into 2010 and 2011.”

Gartner also suggested that the HVD market will be heavily influenced by market leader VMware by 2012, and it expects that Microsoft will become an HVD supplier in the next 18 to 24 months through its partnership with Citrix.