By Robert Fuller 1

cloud services

While it’s a relatively new sector, its one in which analysts at Gartner are anticipating significant growth. In fact, according to a recent study, Gartner expects mainstream adoption of hosted virtual desktops to take place in 2012 through 2014, with 70 million users by 2014.  Also according to a recent Gartner study, 60% of SMBs surveyed will be deploying in the next year. If your customers haven’t already started asking about hosted virtual desktops – they will be soon.

Triggering the Trend

What’s driving this shift in desktop computing?  For one, hosted desktop virtualization provides on-demand virtual desktops and applications to users almost anywhere in the world, on almost any device (including PCs, smart phones and even tablets).  Such a solution is designed to seamlessly provide IT departments with improved productivity, increased flexibility, lower CapEx, improved business agility and simplified desktop management across a large number of employees and devices.

By running a virtual desktop solution at an off-premise hosting provider, companies can also free up valuable IT resources for more critical internal business operations.  While enterprises are currently the biggest adopters, the companies that stand to benefit the most from hosted virtual desktops are SMBs – likely a sizeable chunk of your customer base.

This is an industry we are very excited about. Virtual desktop solutions have grown in popularity, and now the ability to host them through your hosting partners will provide you with another offering in your tool belt of solutions.

If you want to learn more about the potential for this market, or how hosted virtual desktops work, check out the new platform we’ve just launched.  You’ll see how easy it can be to tap into this potential market without the additional expenses associated with purchasing the hardware to do it yourself for customers.

Robert Fuller is VP of worldwide channel sales at Rackspace Hosting. Read all of Fuller’s guest blogs here. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are part of TalkinCloud’s annual platinum sponsorship.