Those involved in desktop virtualization have underestimated the significance that browser-delivered applications will have in the future. We have been so busy looking at ways of virtualizing client operating systems and applications that we have not been paying sufficient attention to a shift that will have a very significant effect on what we do in the future. INSIDER (registration required)

While desktop virtualization implementations are moving forward rapidly, it is not an economic solution for all users, as Microsoft has shown with a recently published paper. As always, the devil is in the details.

Multiple technology cycles have added infrastructure that is now legacy. Use desktop virtualization as a catalyst to consolidate and eliminate systems that are holding you back.

We each deal with disaster in our own ways and organizations can have differing attitudes too. How successful your virtualization-based disaster recovery program will be is hugely dependent on that attitude.

Application virtualization has been with us, as a technology, for a long time. Only now is it starting to be recognized as a way to solve one of the most intractable problems of IT.

Laptops have always been a challenge to manage and frankly not a lot has changed to improve the situation recently. Recently Citric announced availability of trial downloads of their client hypervisor. Does this change the game on laptops and is it the only way virtualization can help?

In the data center, virtualization is becoming the underlying technology for many different IT needs, from high availability to disaster recovery, which takes it from being a way of controlling costs for under-used applications to becoming a strategic part of how IT is managed.