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Death of the desktop: Virtual systems could kill off the biz PC

BYOD and ever-sophisticated VDI offerings are changing everything

Blocks and Files The business PC desktop is facing death by a thousand VDI cuts augmented by a BYOD bashing.

Her are just a few reasons to predict the death of the business desktop :

I know this is repetitious – that’s partly the point. These aren’t just a few pointers, this is a flood, a veritable tidal wave of systems all focused on removing pricey and complex-to-manage business desktops with centralised virtual desktop systems.

Some other suppliers with VDI capabilities include: Pure Storage, Tegile, Nimble Storage and Fusion-io. A combination of flash storage and deduplication is making it possible for cost-efficient and storage capacity-efficient VDI set-ups with the responsiveness of actual desktops, or better.

Set this VDI blitzkrieg to one side and consider BYOD - Bring Your Own Device, in which users bring their own notebook computers to the office. This is the guerilla war assaulting the business PC with VDI being a full-on, frontal assault.

The net result could be a multi-year reduction in business PC use with, in some businesses, desktop PCS literally disappearing.

We haven’t any numbers, beyond the general PC annual shipment numbers decline. Our sense of it is that the business desktop is an endangered IT species facing year-on-year shipment declines, wilting under the impact of artillery barrages from the massed ranks of VDI howitzers and BYOD sharpshooters.

In that case there will be a consequent decline in business PC component shipments – hard disk drives, power supplies, DRAM, motherboards and CPUs.

If 200,000 business desktops go away each year for five years that’s a million fewer hard drives shipped. And it could be worse; 500,000 fewer desktops each year means 2.5 million fewer drives over five years.

I think we’re at a VDI/BYOD tipping point and a storm surge of virtual desktop instances is going to wash increasingly unwanted and unloved business desktops right out of the offices they’re anchored to, never to return. On the other hand, someone's got to flog those BYOD devices...®

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