2013 Mobility and BYOD Drive VDI Adoption

- Lee Caswell, founder and chief strategy officer at Pivot3, says:

Desktop virtualization – two words that are continuously debated by industry pundits, while often leading to a prediction year after year of mass adoption. However, I do believe that we will start to see larger adoption patterns and interest in 2013 due to several industry trends and technologies that are converging.

IT investment in 2013 will lag rather than anticipate user needs

In the face of fixed IT budgets, we see IT departments re-prioritizing 2013 project priorities based on established user needs rather than on anticipated or hyped desires. This is nearly the reverse of 2012 priorities where IT raced to understand Big Data and Cloud initiatives through a flurry of discovery projects that predictably showed how early in the hype cycle we were. Meanwhile, a massive shift occurred during the year from standalone PCs to tablets and this will push mobility initiatives higher in the IT priority stack than we saw in 2012.

Mobility eclipses cloud in 2013 IT project priority

The reality of mobile device proliferation creates a pent-up demand for solving the security and backup needs of an increasingly typical 2013 multi-device user who expects to securely access corporate applications at any time from any device. This is not a fabricated need but a very tangible demand with hard ROI justification. The very real transition of the typical office desktop corporate PC user to a mobile worker simultaneously accessing corporate applications from a combination of tablets, thin clients, and a smartphone will not be ignored in 2013.

BYOD is a windfall for Windows8 and therefore VDI adoption

Corporations have traditionally been able to control the timing of new OS deployments because they control the purchase of PCs and the operating system that resides on those PCs. But what happens in a BYOD world where employees buy their PCs direct from BestBuy and Fry’s? Those PCs are loaded with Windows8 and they are coming to an enterprise near you! We expect to see a race to deploy VDI as IT’s way to maintain control over the timing of Windows8 support and for legacy applications migrated to Windows8.