Tim Whiteley, Co-Founder, Inevidesk, says VDI has a strong chance of remaining relevant and complementary for organisations currently pondering what the future might hold.
There is little room for the consideration of tech beyond the exponential avalanche of AI activity; it smothers all in its path, picking up social, political, philosophical, financial and just about every other aspect of discourse as it bears relentlessly down on us.
When something is heralded as truly world changing, we all await the impact with bated breath. We don’t know what’s coming, but we brace for impact regardless.
Big tech layoffs demonstrate the current and predicted exchange in people for AI investment. Money directed to NVIDIA, data centre development and small-form nuclear reactors paint a picture of the near future, one that is already infecting many service and software vendors. Change is happening and preparations are underway in many quarters, but where does that leave technologies such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)?
The inevitable rise of VDI
The VDI market is projected to grow in the coming years, fuelled by the rise of remote and hybrid work, the demand for improved resiliency and agility and the need to better address the increasing frequency of opportunities and challenges in a rapidly changing world.
There is no doubt that the benefits of centralised, virtual data centre hosted infrastructure continue to gain traction, whether organisations are compelling staff to return to the office or not. The improvements it offers in terms of estate management, security, flexibility and resiliency are difficult to argue with, especially for organisations that need to connect multiple offices and geolocations and open up for location agnostic talent.
While sustainability appears to be losing its potency within political discourse, VDI retains appeal for the environmentally minded alongside its practical attractions.
A volatile market
There have been pre-AI informed shifts in the VDI market in recent years, with a certain level of re-shoring as some organisations depart the public cloud for greener, less expensive and more comfortably data-protected environments. Such movement may accelerate as concern over big tech’s use of data and intellectual property intensifies with the increasing reach of LLM developers’ data grab. Private clouds consisting of private VDI, AI and data services might be a way to retain control at the organisational level. Given the geopolitical turn towards more nationalistic policies in many countries, this might be seen as a natural extension to maintain critical data and services within more localised and protected infrastructures.
Such control would be strengthened by the utilisation of open-source solutions, an approach being undertaken by an increasing number of organisations in light of the recent changes with leading vendor VMware, now owned by Broadcom. Last year the company divested its VDI end user compute business and refocused on enterprise customers with challenging price rises and terms which are rumoured to grow even tougher with a new higher level of entry.
VMware’s rebrand, now Omnissa, is undertaking its own post-acquisition round of layoffs and has yet to prove itself a long-term viable option, with many customers retaining dependence on other VMware products.
Other VDI vendors, such as Citrix and Nutanix, remain stable, but cost and complexity put the services out of reach of many SMEs, especially in the current economic environment.
Shifting beyond on-premises infrastructure
We don’t yet know how the VDI landscape is going to be impacted by the increased use of AI-informed services, but in many ways, it is positioned to enable a seamless transition than those organisations still wedded to physical on-premises infrastructure.
Primarily, resources within a VDI environment can be reassigned to other services, enabling virtual devices to be scaled for specific tasks and underlying hardware to be re-employed should demand shift; another aspect which supports sustainability goals. Of course, there can be no guarantees, but organisations will want to avoid replacing expensive infrastructure too soon – so building in potential flexibility now makes much more sense.
Centralised and more easily secured infrastructure also reduces attack vectors and helps simplify the protection of organisational data and privately trained AI models. This element will be salient to most companies and important in the resistance to big tech AI appropriation.
Futureproofing in an AI-driven world
The transition to AI-dominated workflows, when and if it occurs, may be far from straightforward. There is a definite bubble at present with huge investments, both private and public, going into AI services that have yet to prove profitability or ultimate use cases.
Current geopolitical trade skirmishes and stagnant Western economies could cause additional AI-related turbulence – if not a crash. Being alive to such possibilities should not prohibit investment in infrastructure. Rather it should inform investment in infrastructure that will help organisations better weather the brewing storms on the horizon and ensure smoother sailing thereafter.
Wherever the next few years of technical evolution take us, we will likely see the virtual desktop unfold into a wider and increasingly agile resource base for human and non-human agents. VDI therefore has a strong chance of remaining relevant and complementary for organisations currently pondering what the future might hold.
