Don’t be surprised if one day your ICT department sends out the following memo:
Dear Employee:
As part of our company’s move to virtual desktop environments, the ICT department will no longer buy laptops. Instead, employees will receive a $3,000 stipend to purchase a laptop, provided it meets our baseline memory and processing power requirements. It will be your machine to keep whether you stay with the company or not, but you will have responsibility for arranging for hardware support through your vendor.
Sincerely,
Your ICT manager
Gartner told attendees at its recent annual datacentre conference in Las Vegas that it expects companies to increasingly virtualise desktop environments to improve PC management and security. An offshoot of that trend may be a shift to employee ownership of the hardware.
ICT managers who were at the conference say virtualising desktops — and to a lesser extent shifting ownership to employees — might make sense. A virtual PC environment could be more secure and less susceptible to conflicts and problems that arise after staff install their own productivity applications or games. They also believe they might save on software licensing costs if applications can be delivered as needed.
But Davis isn’t convinced that the technology available today matches the vision. “All I’m hearing is manufacturer hype,” he says. “It’s got to mature some.”
Gartner analyst Thomas Bittman believes many companies would rather manage a virtual environment on an employee’s laptop and not worry about all the other applications that may have been loaded on a system. “It’s a lot harder to lock down the hardware than it is a virtual machine,” he says.
Bittman also believes that once a company makes the move to a virtual environment, it can explore the idea of giving workers ownership of their PCs.
Thomas O’Sullivan, operations manager at the Montana Department of Transportation (DOT), says he can see employee ownership of laptops coming. Those who now have handheld devices, for instance, want to be able to synchronise their devices with their work email and applications and already use their own hardware for work.
“The laptop may be the next logical step,” O’Sullivan says, noting that the DOT, which already virtualises servers, is investigating doing the same for PCs.
Dodd Vernon, operations manager at Walgreen, a pharmacy chain with 5,500 stores, says the virtualisation of laptop and desktop environments has been discussed. But he says his company will need to see the technology proven before it takes action.
Even so, Vernon says he can see the appeal of individually owned PCs that log into virtual environments and that employee ownership would likely help with ICT maintenance and staffing.
“I think there could be some cost benefit,” Vernon says, adding that there might be some resistance from users and that a company would likely have to help employees pay for hardware purchases.