Long and winding road for next virtualisation step

Lamy: Desktop virtualisation could be more fruitful this year for the channel

While desktop virtualisation will be on everyone’s lips this year, resellers that focus on potential and quick cost savings may disappoint their customers, according to channel players at IDC’s 2010 desktop virtualisation conference in London.

Although significant cost savings for the customer are certainly one possible result of virtualising the desktop, the process is also likely to prove expensive, with any savings accumulating over four or five years, or even longer.

“If you virtualise a greater proportion of your users, you can make those savings, but it is very, very tough to do that,” says Iain Mobberley, virtualisation practice leader at consultancy and solution provider OCSL.

“With server virtualisation, that was a very easy sell to the business. You can rip up the servers and make very easy savings. It gets more complicated when you look at the desktop.”

Complex sell
Unlike with server and even storage virtualisation, desktop virtualisation – whether thin-client focused, application virtualisation, or any other variety – is a complex and less obvious sell, he says.

That said, it will remain attractive for organisations of all stripes and sizes, especially if they have already made substantial savings and boast increased efficiencies as a result of, say, server and storage virtualisation. Desktop virtualisation is the next step for such companies but they must plan thoroughly and be able to wear the cost of transformation, he says.

“You need to do the preparation, and understand where you can save money, first off,” Mobberley says. “Without enough planning, you will stop and start, and stop and start, and you will eventually abandon the project or it will get deployed to only a small proportion of your community.”

He says OCSL has been “getting its hands dirty” with desktop virtualisation technologies for customers over the past 18 months and definitely sees an upswing in interest. But there is not enough understanding of the true costs around virtualising the desktop and the complexities of such projects – let alone the benefits, he says.

Furthermore, every single customer is different. There is no single approach that VARs and integrators can take to guarantee success. Consultation is and will continue to be key, he says.

“With the customers we go to, they may say, ‘we want to take these 5,000 desktops and put them into the production environment in a VDI, but when you tell them they might need 500 spindles to run the virtual desktops, they are somewhat aghast,” Mobberley says. “That is quite a lot of storage.”

Customers may need to ramp up other resources, such as their server power, security, and process policies, too, Mobberley adds.

VDI rather than cloud
Lionel Lamy, European software and services research director at IDC, says though that desktop virtualisation as a trend does offer at the moment more hope for the channel than either cloud computing, unified communications, or Software as a Service (SaaS) – despite the current hype about those technologies.

“IT services are an engine of growth, and desktop virtualisation addresses the cost and quality problems of infrastructure delivery,” Lamy says.

“There has been a huge shift back towards looking at the impact of costs in infrastructure, but IT alignment with business is still the number one thing.”

Lamy says the latest IDC research into companies with 250 or more staff suggests that over the next 12 months sorting out the desktop environment is a top priority for many businesses, with a view to networking and secure access.

“Desktop virtualisation is about the user, but it is also bringing a whole bunch of things back into the datacentre under central control. We found that customers are more likely to do [desktop] virtualisation than things like storage management, automation, unified communications … cloud computing, and green computing. They are still positive, but not as much,” he says.

A need for greater information security will probably accelerate that interest in virtualisation, adds Lamy.

“There are three flavours: server-based computing such as Citrix [deployments], VDI as all about a server running a hypervisor, and … the consolidated client or blade PC option, or running different hardware infrastructure on different server infrastructure within the datacentre,” Lamy says.

Andy Goddard, workplace collaboration practice leader at Computacenter, says he agreed with a lot of what had been said. With its customers, it is predicting RoIs for desktop virtualisation of four or five years, with real hard work needed if the hoped-for cost savings – mined from improvements across a wide range of changes to the customer’s IT and operations – are to be realised.

To reach the goal, a substantial amount of estate may need to be moved to fat clients, adds Goddard.

“VDI does provide tangible benefits for specific scenarios. We see VDI today as a tactical deployment. You do need to get yourselves on that road,” he says.

Virtualisation still misunderstood
In January, Computacenter released a survey suggesting that virtualisation overall is still misunderstood by organisations. Most of the 130 respondents thought that virtualised desktop infrastructure (VDI) makes it easier to manage and support desktop applications, with 83 per cent claiming it is easier to deploy and 70 per cent that it is easier to maintain.

This is not actually the case in most implementations, Computacenter says, and indicates a need for better education of customers.

A further third of respondents said that they believed their company had taken a short-term view of virtualisation, thinking of it as a tool to achieve quick cost savings.

To make things even worse, 29 per cent admitted that they did not have sufficient end-to-end management to control and monitor virtual environments once they had been deployed. At the same time, they expected VDI to deliver RoI in just a year – not very likely.

Forty-one per cent did say their organisation was considering outsourcing virtual desktops to a third-party supplier, which would help them get VDI benefits such as increased productivity via remote working and hot desking.

The opportunities for the channel are certainly there – but the sell is going to be a lot more difficult and the returns slower in appearing, for both customer and supplier.

But even in server virtualisation projects, full RoI is achieved by less than 10 per cent of customers, according to the Computacenter survey, which spoke to IT decision makers in verticals such as banking and finance, the public sector, manufacturing, retail, and legal.

It also found that, although 61 per cent of respondents considered virtualisation very important in improving IT operations and cost-effectiveness over the next two years, 50 per cent believed cloud computing to be of little or no importance to those goals. Computacenter, though, thinks this could be because virtualisation is a more mature market, and people are just more confused as yet about cloud.

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