It may not be immediately apparent to some hardened IT professionals that what happens on the multitudinous desktops of a large enterprise can have a positive effect on the capital expenditure such a company expends on its infrastructure. Even more to the point, I would guess it is a very rare day when the collective `corporate desktops’ are ever seen by IT staff as anything other than a source of pain. 

Yet there are a number of vendors now pushing hard on supplying technology that, at one level at least, seem to be changing the rules on how those multitudinous desktops get integrated with the core enterprise infrastructure, what applications they are delivered and how they are managed. 

For example, what would be the reaction of the average enterprise IT department to the announcement by senior business management that a couple of new offices were to be opened in far-flung, and quite possibly God-forsaken parts of the Globe? I can’t help but assume that, for many, the answer would start with “oh….” And be rapidly followed by the expletive of your choice. Ensuring that those new desktops were fully integrated into the enterprise network could involve some serious engineering, and not a little in capital investment. This would be needed to ensure that there is sufficient processing power in a local server to maintain the operations of those desktop systems, keep communications with base synchronised and manage the applications, and resultant data, running on those desktop systems. And then there is the staffing training to consider….and….and…. 

Yet I have come across one company – currently protective of the competitive advantage it sees itself gaining – that has recently opened three new offices around the world and spent no more in cap-ex than shipping out pre-configured thin clients and an internet connection. These require no more skill to get running and productive than `connect the blue cable to the blue socket’. These new desktop systems are then provisioned and managed from the existing HQ IT resources and require no extra investment in hardware or staff. 

There is an investment in software, in that it uses desktop virtualisation – in this case from VMware. But there are a growing list of alternatives from which to choose, with Microsoft being but the latest (and by no means least) to enter the fray. The trick is that virtualised desktops bypass the conspicuous consumption of PC resources in which desktop applications normally partake, delivering instead just the applications components a user needs to complete the specific task demanded of them.  

The work is faster and more manageable, both for them and the IT department in the background – not least because they don’t have the discontinuities caused by rolling out applications to desktops across the world. 

Getting the world’s enterprise desktops under some sort of control has always been a major objective for enterprise IT managers, but now they can become an integral part of the overall infrastructure, where they belong.