By: Courtney Burry, Director of Product Marketing, End User Computing, VMware
Simplifying desktop management is still a very compelling reason for organizations across the globe to make the move to desktop virtualization. And not surprisingly, many organizations seem to make this move when faced with an upcoming or imminent PC refresh. Why? Because they can take the money that would typically go into buying a whole new fleet of PCs and instead invest this money into virtual desktop infrastructure. PCs can be repurposed to run as thin clients and given a new lease on life-usually with better performance. And IT organizations can focus on improving data security, supporting workplace mobility and driving down the day to day costs of desktop management.
Information Age highlighted a great example of this with Hertz-the global car rental company, earlier this week. Faced with the need to improve operational efficiencies, Hertz had the choice of refreshing its fleet of 4000 PCs and laptops spread across over 1,000 sites across Europe or moving to desktop virtualization.
By moving to desktop virtualization with VMware® Horizon View™, Hertz has been able to improve PCI compliance and security, reduce operational costs (help desk incidents alone have dropped by 33%) and simplify technical infrastructure.
Not surprisingly, Hertz expects to save a lot of hardware investments in the coming years by extending desktop lifecycles from three to five years up to 10 years with the use of Dell Wyse thin clients.
Western Wayne-a school district out in Pennsylvania, is another really good case in point. The district received a “classrooms for the future” grant a couple of years back. Instead of putting the money into new laptops-the IT department opted to build out their virtual desktop infrastructure and move to thin clients. And while the district spent a good chunk of their grant on getting their virtual desktop project off the ground in year one-by year two they were seeing real savings. In fact-they were even able to take some of these savings and offer up funding to the art and music departments for new technology purchases.
Now if you can’t repurpose PCs that you own in the process of moving to VDI- certain organizations have also shown that you can repurpose the PCs of your partners instead…
Facing significant budget cuts, the Iowa Workforce and Development Agency, one of Iowa’s largest state agencies-was actually asked to close over half of its 55 offices. Still intent on providing agency services-it partnered with other organizations that had PCs on hand for public use-including other state agencies, public libraries, National Guard Offices and colleges and leveraged virtual desktops to drive down costs by $6.5M, enhance security and reach more people than ever before. And it didn’t matter that partner PCs were older since the PCs were repurposed to run as thin clients. Today the agency has over 1500 virtual desktops running across all 99 counties in the state.
Looking to replace your fleet of desktops, laptops or tablets this year? You may just want to take a look at desktop virtualization and repurpose those PCs instead. 🙂
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