Quoting the press release:

Survey Cites Hardware Optimization and Reducing Application Management Costs as the Top Two Benefits of Virtualization Technologies

Altiris Inc., a pioneer of service-oriented management solutions, today announced that, according to a recent survey(1) commissioned by Altiris, 41 percent of IT organizations plan to deploy virtualization in client PC environments. The survey also revealed that the top two benefits of virtualization technologies are hardware optimization and reducing the cost of deploying and maintaining applications.

While 41 percent of respondents plan to deploy client PC virtualization, the survey of more than 550 IT professionals found that only 8 percent of all individuals surveyed have currently deployed application virtualization technologies in their client environment. In comparison, 71 percent of those surveyed have deployed or plan to deploy virtualization in their server environment.

Steve Morton, Altiris VP of product management and marketing, said, "Software virtualization reduces the cost and complexity of software management and the demonstration of these benefits will continue to extend virtualization from the data center to the client PC. Altiris(R) Software Virtualization Solution(TM) makes virtualization on the client PC a reality today and is easy to implement for both enterprises and small businesses."

Looking forward, the survey revealed that the most important future software virtualization capabilities include manageability of virtual environments, terminal server support and OS patch virtualization.

Morton went on to say, "We also see that IT organizations are clamoring for better management of their virtualized environments. It seems that in the rush to take advantage of the benefits of virtualization, manageability of virtual environments was underestimated and administrators are now feeling the pinch of manual processes."