Endpoint virtualization survey highlights user benefits

Endpoint virtualization is quickly becoming a growing area in information technology today. IT departments are implementing the technology with the hopes of increasing user productivity while lowering IT costs.

Endpoint virtualization offers IT the ability to virtualize the workspace, allowing it to be made portable from device to device or even in the cloud.

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Symantec says that endpoint virtualization provides higher levels of mobility and application delivery, thus enabling users to concentrate on being productive and allowing IT to concentrate on lowering the cost of delivering a portable, customized user experience.

To help validate those assumptions, Symantec recently surveyed 300 IT administrators regarding their use of endpoint virtualization technology. And many of its key findings were extremely interesting to someone on the outside looking in, but what did Symantec think of these survey results?

“The information from this survey validates what we believe at Symantec: Endpoint virtualization can drive substantial cost out of managing the workspace for enterprise users and change the way software is delivered and consumed,” said Brad Rowland, marketing director at Symantec’s Endpoint Virtualization unit. “Companies are highly focused on finding ways to leverage IT for a more productive workforce while reducing cost. Virtualization helps make computing for end-users extremely portable and flexible, helping IT to reduce costs and respond to rapidly changing business needs. In today’s economic climate any new technology proposal has to be able to prove its return right out of the gate, and endpoint virtualization has the potential to do this today.”

Rowland made himself available to me to go through some of these survey findings.

One response showed that 76 percent of respondents said their organization has already implemented an endpoint virtualization solution into its IT infrastructure. That number seemed quite impressive.

Rowland looked at it this way: “Considering that until recently most endpoint virtualization has been point products or single vendor silos, this is an astounding figure that shows how valuable IT is finding the technology to be. This means companies found it valuable enough to require specially trained personnel, new processes, point vendors, and still found a compelling ROI for some part of their organization. Over the coming years, endpoint virtualization will be more and more baked into larger frameworks and based on industry standards which will drive the cost envelope down far enough for ROI on the next set of use cases. Large vendors, such as Symantec, have the advantage here and very few other companies have the ability to provide solutions that address the hybridization of virtual and traditional computing environments like we do. As these solutions continue to converge, our goal is to have virtualization achieve its full potential for changing the way software is delivered and managed, and to help these organizations already utilizing point products take full advantage of endpoint virtualization’s benefits through a comprehensive suite of technologies.”

Another interesting question asked of the respondent was, who is your organization’s primary endpoint virtualization provider? 43% said Microsoft, 19% said VMware and 8% said Symantec.

“There were some real surprises here, as some of these vendors are not widely known to be focused on endpoint virtualization,” said Rowland. “Symantec continues to grow our presence in this space and has a focus on the broader enterprise desktop base versus primarily datacenter-centric solutions; this unique approach is and is going to continue to make a big impact. With moves like our recent launch of our application virtualization solution, SVS, wrapping Firefox on HP PCs for better browsing, we are bringing solutions directly to the endpoint.”

When there are economic problems like the ones facing us today, IT shops are usually forced to take some pretty drastic measures in the form of budget cuts. Interestingly, the survey results showed that 36% of respondents said that at least a quarter of their entire 2009 IT budget would be earmarked for endpoint virtualization initiatives.

To that, Rowland said, “In this time of economic downturn, many IT projects are being put on hold or re-evaluated. It is pretty surprising to see these survey results and hear feedback from users of Symantec’s Endpoint Virtualization, like Butler University (from the MF media roundtable), that are not only not putting endpoint virtualization projects on hold, but because of their strong and immediate ROI are escalating endpoint virtualization as a priority. Technology that can demonstrate a return now is countercyclical and, some would dare hope, recession-proof.”

If you are interested in learning about more of these key endpoint virtualization survey results, you can view the entire Symantec Endpoint Virtualization survey from October 2008 here.