Desktop sales growth still possible

Sales around the desktop can be generated if the user experience is fully taken into account, says Ronnie Khan

Khan: Desktop management is time-consuming and the environment is static

Looking at reports on the future of the desktop, you might imagine this market is sliding downhill fast. Laptop sales have been outpacing desktop sales for a couple of years, while the economic slowdown has delayed large-scale desktop refresh projects.

But I would argue that there are huge opportunities for resellers around the desktop and new business opportunities are developing. Windows 7 is Microsoft’s most successful operating system ever, while desktop virtualisation is also tempting organisations into looking at their strategies for the future.

The sheer age of some desktops out there is also forcing some organisations to look at their machines for replacement.

This has created a perfect storm for desktop and associated software and services sales: instead of the one-off sales opportunity that an OS migration or hardware refresh offers, resellers can look at how to solve the problems that customers have managing their evolving desktop environments.

This approach not only offers organisations the opportunity to up-sell services but provides greater long-term value to the customer.

The biggest problem with desktops is not just about the user experience, it’s keeping that experience available to the user. Typically, the management of desktop estate is time consuming, and users notice little benefit. The desktop also tends to be a rather static environment that does not evolve with ever-changing user requirements.

Taking a more long-term approach to the desktop involves knowing how users want to work, and how to best connect them with these assets. For example, a mobile worker may want access to applications from remote locations while travelling.

Allowing full access while the user dials in over an insecure Wi-Fi network is not the best approach. So being able to recognise where someone is, the level of access they should have, and then delivering the right desktop experience to them based on this context-aware information is compelling.

What links all the different desktop sale opportunities together is how a desktop session is composed: how the user settings, applications and data are sent across to end users so they can be productive.

This process of composition is well understood in the static desktop world, even though it causes significant overhead for managing the Windows estate. Opportunities for the future lie in making this composition more dynamic: linking the context of the end user to which applications, settings and data they are allowed to access, and being able to apply the right set-up to any desktop environment that the user is using.

This may be described as ‘decomposing’ the desktop.

Helping customers to understand this requirement for management is critical. Instead of looking at the costs of replacement desktop machines as a one-off cost, customers should look at the overall spending on desktop management, and how their chosen approach can reduce this in future.

Resellers can use the point reasons for upgrading, OS migration or desktop virtualisation, as a way to show customers how they can benefit from longer-term cost savings and easier management. Solving these problems involves understanding the user requirements much better, as well as how this move from static desktops to more dynamic workspaces can be achieved.

Resellers must understand the problems that customers face in desktop management, as well as how to solve these issues simply and cost effectively. Looking at how desktops are managed individually, as well as across an organisation, is therefore critical.

Ronnie Khan is UK country manager at RES Software