By Paul Kunert
7 October 2008
The thin client market is set to boom following the advent of virtualisation according to analyst predictions, heaping further pressure on the traditional desktop market and the pure PC players in that space.
Around 4 million thin clients are expected to be shipped worldwide in 2008 said industry watcher Gartner but volumes are forecast to balloon to 20 million by 2012, representing compound annual growth rates of 45%
“Many organisations are moving to hosted virtual desktops so traditional desktops as we know them will be squeezed and that has implications for vendors and their partners,” said Gartner principal analyst Ranjit Atwal.
Virtualisation allows firms to better manage and secure data centrally and Gartner said most users (70%) did not fully utilise the compute performance in desktops, meaning thin clients were a strong alternative.
The shift to notebooks and the drive to thin clients spelled danger signs for vendors that had not moved from a product to solution based orientation said the analyst.
“Fundamentally, the server, networking and storage parts of the solution will be the core from where organisations will look for cost savings and productivity improvements,” he said.
Virtualisation projects in the mainstream client space are around the corner said Lewis Gee, vice president for the northern region EMEA at VMware but deploying the technology will not be as straight forward as in the data centre.
“Client virtualisation is more complex, not from a technology perspective but from a usage perspective. To an extent a data centre is a data centre and most have similar challenges of power usage or size,” he told Microscope.
“But there are many different types of users at the [client] level… and a variety of different devices, I think virtualisation has a key role to play but we are talking to customers to find out what they are trying to achieve,” he said.
Chris Ingle, consultancy and research director at IDC, said resellers required a different skill sets and a broader set of contacts within a customers as staff looking after data centres often differed to those looking after client devices.
