Hosted Desktop Market (DaaS)
As I stated a few months ago in one of the articles on my blog, DaaS would have been one of the hot topics in 2013. And the main reason for that is owed to the fact that Desktop as a Service is considered to be the ideal platform for cloud computing in small and medium-sized businesses.
With the DaaS model, the virtual desktops and relating infrastructure are all run as a service within the cloud. Adopting DaaS, organizations will manage desktop images and apps, and will reduce the costs of physical infrastructure while managing apps much more efficiently.
According to Gartner, hosted desktop should have been equal to more than 40% of the worldwide professional PC market in 2013, meaning $65.7 billion. Gartner stated that hosted virtual desktop market would accelerate through 2013 to reach 49 million units, up from more than 500,000 units in 2009. Another research from Research and Markets forecast that the global hosted virtual desktop market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 65.7% over the period 2012-2016.
The main key factor contributing to this market growth is the increasing need to reduce desktop infrastructure costs. Another factor that influences this growth is the development of cloud computing and cloud based services. Indeed, as mentioned by Brian Gammage, vice president and Gartner fellow back in 2009, Hosted Virtual Desktop (HVD) adoption was rapid particularly in mature markets where existing data centers and network infrastructures were used to offset the cost of entry.
The cost of entry is also cited as one of the biggest challenges in the report from Research and Markets. The initial investment is normally high, as it has to cover the costs of server infrastructure, a virtualization server, and the required software and high bandwidth support for enabling hosted virtual desktop solutions.
Some of the early adopters of HVD face operational challenges that stop them from expanding their adoption. That’s why the vendors operating in this market are “big names” including Citrix Systems Inc., Microsoft Corp., Oracle Corp., VMware Inc., Dell Inc., Desktone Inc., RedHat Inc., and Unidesk Corp.
Photo source: https://www.sxc.hu/photo/721074
Dave Walker
Nice introductory article; hope to see more on the issues involved with hosted virtual desktop, as extensions of the excellent VDI postings over at SearchVirtualDataCenter.
It can be argued that Oracle are actually getting out of the HVD market, given their recent announcements to kill their VDI and Sun Ray products.