Many enterprise vendors are banking on desktop virtualisation playing a major part within corporate IT infrastructure in the future. For customers, the technology holds out the promise of easier management and better security by pulling end-user accounts back into the datacentre, while still allowing access to standard Windows applications.

As a side effect of this move towards virtual desktop machines, enterprises may soon be deploying more thin clients than in the past, to serve as an appliance-like user console for virtual Windows PCs that are actually hosted in a firm’s datacentre.

One vendor hoping to benefit from this is Igel Technology, which has just announced membership of both the VMware and Citrix certification programmes, the aims of which are to assure customers that the thin clients they buy will work with the virtual desktop systems from the respective vendors.

“Companies aren’t going to need desktop PCs in the future,” said Stephen Yeo, strategic marketing director at Igel. “In the corporate space you will have laptops for mobile workers, and thin devices accessing virtual machines for everyone else,” he said.

According to Yeo, VMware believes that desktop virtualisation is the next big thing. “There are many more PCs than servers deployed in companies,” he pointed out.

But VMware does not have this market to itself; Citrix is also a player, although it has approached the market from the opposite end. “Citrix has strength in delivery technology, while VMware has strength in virtualisation and the datacentre,” said Yeo, adding that the two “will meet in the middle”.

Besides the issues of management and security, Yeo pointed to multi-core processors as a factor that will drive greater take-up of desktop virtualisati on.

“The megahertz wars in chips have now turned into a core race,” he said, referring to plans by AMD and Intel for chips with as many as 12 cores within two years.

“Current operating systems are not much good at handling more than four cores, so virtualisation is the only effective way to make use of all that power. The more cores there are in the processor, the more redundant the desktop PC becomes,” he said.

But while thin clients have been around for at least a decade, they have largely been a niche device, used for basic data entry in environments such as call centres. This is because some applications did not work well under a server-based model where the desktop was effectively shared.

“Virtual PCs remove that, giving each user their own desktop, so companies can migrate [users] to the datacentre without further risk,” said Yeo.

Yeo also pointed to moves by Citrix that will make the user experience of virtual desktops as seamless as possible. The company’s XenDesktop Appliance programme specifies how the desktop console should look and behave when used with Citrix infrastructure.

“With current thin clients, the remote session appears as a window, just like any other application, but under XenDesktop, it fills the screen and you can’t shrink it. It will smell, taste and look exactly like you are using a physical PC,” explained Yeo.

Igel is just one of several vendors, including HP and Wyse, that have signed up to the Citrix certification programme, as well as that of rival VMware.

However, Igel gives users the option to turn this appliance mode on or off, so that they can still use the thin client’s browser or an alternative protocol such as ICA or RDP.

“We feel it would be a weakness if our products had access to only one protocol,” said Yeo. He explained that many enterprise applications, such as SAP, are browser-based anyway, and so users can go direct to these from the thin client and cut out the PC middleman.

The risk for vendors such as Igel is that the Citrix appliance scheme might turn their products into commodities. Yeo said Igel’s “digital services” strategy was one way the firm could differentiate itself.

“The best way to deliver a PC-like experience is to have services operate close to the user. We’re looking at how virtual PCs can use digital services on the thin client to deliver this,” he said.

This will see the device handling content such as Flash or Silverlight animations, or even voice-over-IP calls, instead of the virtual machine on the server. A similar approach is being developed by rival vendor Wyse with its TCX extensions.

If appliance-like consoles are able to deliver a comparable experience to a full desktop PC, large enterprises may be tempted to migrate to a virtual desktop architecture in future, and thin clients may finally live up to their potential.