We recently wrote a piece for VMBlog's series predicting what lies ahead in 2011 for Desktop virtualization.

Here's an excerpt of the article - what do you think? Are we on the right track?

2011 - Predictions of what lies ahead in Desktop Virtualization
The year 2011 is going to be very exciting for desktop virtualization. Why? Because several trends that have been building steam in the last couple of years are joining forces to create a big splash.  While no one knows exactly what the future holds, here are my predictions, derived directly and indirectly from numerous real user experiences, for the upcoming year:

• Mobile devices become the perfect desktop clients. I'm sure this one comes as a surprise to no one. More companies will adopt mobile devices such as the Apple iPad or Android aPads as the primary ways to access their corporate desktops. The growing popularity of these devices is driven by end-user demand. From executives to students and sales agents, users appreciate the anytime, anywhere access these portable devices provide.
  For IT, this means finding an efficient way to deliver and support the corporate desktop (typically Windows based) on these devices without having to take on the added support burden of managing a wide array of mobile devices.
• Virtualization becomes an embedded feature, not a specialized competency. As the use of virtualization grows across every aspect of IT, it is becoming an embedded feature of products rather than a core competency of its own. We are seeing virtualized networks, servers, desktops, storage, and applications. As this trend grows, it is untenable to view virtualization as a specialized IT competency that is managed by a handful of datacenter/virtualization experts. In 2011, we will see vendors increasingly embed and simplify virtualization within their products so that IT of varying skill sets can easily setup and manage the solutions themselves without needing specific virtualization expertise.
• Cloud economics permeate in-house virtualization. Cloud computing offers three compelling benefits that customers find attractive: elasticity (grow or shrink capacity on-demand), pay-as-you-go, and the convenience of a managed service. Since these benefits are primarily derived from multi-tenanting/sharing a physical infrastructure across multiple customers, the same results have not been achievable with in-house virtualization. This is changing especially as virtualization vendors are paring down the infrastructure needed to run their solutions. This year we will start seeing similar economic benefits with in-house (private) clouds as we see with public clouds -- particularly in specific application areas such as desktop virtualization and storage virtualization.
• Rise in integrated end-to-end solutions. Why assemble your own car if you can buy one for less? In many ways, we are still at the "assemble-it-yourself" step with virtualization and cloud computing. While the market is still too early to see widespread consolidation, we will see more integrated end-to-end solutions from best-of-breed products. For instance, we will see more turnkey appliances that are pre-configured with the hardware, virtualization stack, and applications.
• Demonstrable capital expense reduction with Virtual Desktops. Historically, the business case for virtual desktops (VDI) has been based on long-term soft dollar operational savings in return for higher upfront capital expense. This has been a tough pill to swallow for many, and cost and complexity are two key hurdles to widespread adoption. In 2011, we will see more examples of demonstrable capital savings from VDI deployments based on second generation VDI architectures that require significantly lower capital investments than traditional PCs.
• VDI production deployments accelerate. For a few years now, analysts have speculated as to when the VDI market will truly hit its stride. 2011 will be the year we see a record number of VDI deployments in production - this is based both on the success that VDI pilots are enjoying this year, and based on the newer VDI architectures that address the cost and complexity barriers to adoption.

In a nutshell, I see 2011 as the beginning of a multi-year growth in production deployments of virtualization and cloud computing that result in greater access, better uptime, at significantly lower costs.

• HJ Bennett Company Considered Card Net Eco Green Prize Recipient 2011