Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2013. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Lee Caswell, founder & chief strategy officer at Pivot3
Solving the 2013 IT Fiscal Cliff with VDI
The VDI market continues to both
confound and delight the industry.
Analysts and vendors alike continue to look for patterns in how VDI is
being used and whether it will follow the same adoption path of its technology
sibling giant, server virtualization.
With a full year of VDI sales under our belt at Pivot3, we've developed
this fresh set of predictions for 2013 based on patterns we've seen with real
customers. In fact, we see a veritable
IT Fiscal Cliff where VDI is one of only a few tools available to solve for
device sprawl in the face of fixed IT budgets and staff.
Multiple devices force VDI adoption
As one industry pundit commented, 2013
is the year that BYOD becomes BYODDDDD. Device
sprawl is upon us with the latest IDC forecasts predicting 40 percent unit
growth in year-over-year tablet shipments in 2013 to 165 million units. More devices, and particularly multiple
devices per user, present huge management challenges for IT when users expect to
access corporate applications securely from any device at any time. VDI is one
of the few tools available to sooth the pain and security risk of device
explosion.
Flat IT budgets tip the ROI scale for VDI
At the same time, IT groups and
budgets aren't expanding to match the growth in devices. In fact it's quite the opposite. IT budgets are being held flat at best. In this environment, 2013 will see IT
investing in VDI to regain the leverage of centralized infrastructure, security
and backup investments for the disparate set of user-owned devices. It's the tried and true IT model that will
hold true for VDI and device proliferation as surely as PC proliferation drove investment
in Novell NetWare LAN adoption in the 1980s.
Enterprise VDI at any scale
We saw a tremendous amount of VDI
experimentation in 2012 from customers ranging from top enterprise to small and
medium business. And a fair amount of
that early discovery took place for less than 100 users on a
single-point-of-failure server because it was affordable and easy to try. But every successful deployment requires
enterprise-level high availability infrastructure for the simple reason that no
IT manager is ready to take the call to say that even 10 users are down at one
time. With VDI comes the expectation
that centralized systems can tolerate failures without compromising
accessibility. As 2012 customer pilots move to 2013 production systems, we
expect to see continued recognition of high-availability storage and server
infrastructure value, along with a passionate search for solutions that aren't
as complicated or costly as a typical SAN and physical server combination.
Summary
End user computing is evolving at the
pace of new endpoint device adoption. As
sure as IT organizations face limited budgets, an unstoppable flood of new
devices and the Windows8 operating system, we're sure to see healthy growth in
2013 as VDI becomes a priority to meet pressing user needs that simply can't be
ignored. Seeing a cliff is, after all, the first step
in planning for a safe 2013.
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About the Author
Lee
Caswell, founder and chief strategy officer of Pivot3
Lee is an experienced
marketing executive in the storage, networking, and digital video markets.
Prior to founding Pivot3, Lee was EVP Marketing and Business Development at
VMware and held a series of senior management roles at Adaptec (ADPT) ending as
VP and General Manager of Adaptec's $350M Storage Solutions Group. Prior to
Adaptec, Lee was VP Sales and Marketing at Parallax Graphics which introduced
the first real-time video capture products for the video surveillance market.
He spent the first five years of his career in management programs at GE. Lee
has a BA from Carleton College and an MBA from the Tuck School at Dartmouth
College.