Virtualisation to go on growing

Cross-selling, up-selling and growth opportunities will increase around virtualisation, suggests Paul Gullett

Last year much of the technology complexity and cost of deployment associated with virtualisation, in particular desktop virtualisation, for businesses of all sizes began to fall away.

Offerings that help the small business perform better, faster and more efficiently are going to be important through 2011.

I believe the technologies that will help drive globalisation and the infrastructures of large enterprise, government institutions and education establishments will be the same as those that will help small businesses succeed – the only difference being size and scale.

I believe that includes virtualisation.

Such a trend -- which is all about delivering more computing power for less -- would not seem to bode well for the channel. However, virtualisation is a growth and margin opportunity, particularly desktop virtualisation.

While I have been evangelising low or no cost desktop access devices for years, and have been a loud and vocal advocate of true market pricing, I am also totally committed to creating a quality margin business for the channel.

It is a myth that desktop virtualisation delivers below PC-type margins. If that were the case, we’d all be out of business.

Desktop virtualisation offers cross and upselling opportunities, delivers software-type margins and is a way to create value-adding relationships between the channel and its customers.

When customers deploy desktop virtualisation, you can add value through additional offerings such as storage, network access, security and services.

Savings can be reallocated to solution-based and vertically tailored products and services that create deep systemic relationships between customer and channel.

I expect to see the education, government and large enterprise adoption to continue to go from strength to strength. I also expect mid-size and small business deployments to increase -- especially as 2011 will remain a year of 'doing more with less'.

Paul Gullett is EMEA vice president at NComputing