LONDON, UK: According to a new IDC study, IT departments in 2009 will face fierce pressure to reduce costs, while at the same time IT environments will become more complex than ever before, with more mobile workers and devices, increased reliance on offshore employees, new security threats, and spiraling costs around management, support, and maintenance.

Desktop virtualisation is a term creating lots of buzz for offerings in the industry, by offering businesses the ability to solve many of these problems and reduce IT costs. One of the newest, and most promising, approaches to desktop virtualisation is virtual distributed desktops, which offers the core benefits of virtualisation while remaining cheap to deploy and supporting both fixed-desk and mobile workers.

To help businesses make the right decisions about centralised virtual desktops (CVDs), IDC conducted a competitive analysis looking at both the technology features and market ecosystems of four of the leading vendors in the space.

IDC found that from a technological perspective RingCube offered some of the best features currently available, while VMware held the strongest marketing position and ecosystem. MokaFive delivered a strong product with excellent management features and Sentillion provided a solution with a high degree of security.

Matthew McCormack, client computing consultant for IDC's European Systems Group, said: "Market maturity remains early for CVD and desktop virtualisation in general, but greatly increased business interest is starting to drive more adoption. Although approaches to CVD are developing rapidly from a technological perspective, businesses will find that many vendors provide solutions that are mature enough to deploy and suitable for a variety of different business scenarios.

"2009 will be a developmental year for desktop virtualisation technology with lots of pilot activity. From 2010 we'll see the technology begin to enter the mainstream."