India expected to see an uptake in desktop virtualization

Jacinta D’Souza, Bangalore
Mint
With virtualization being the new buzzword in IT, India is expected to witness momentum in the field of desktop virtualization as more and more enterprises drive efforts at scaling down cost of per unit desktop.

IT services followed by telecom are expected to lead the virtualization wave considering their need for technology savings, Krishnan Thyagarajan managing director, India sub-continent, Quest Software, a Nasdaq-listed enterprise system management vendor, said.

“In India, we tend to hire more knowledge labour and work in shifts which means we need more desktops. But cost per desk top unit is pretty expensive”, he told the agency.

The use of desk top virtualization would mean cutting cost of having so many physical desktops. “You could have 1000 physical desktops and 18000 people working through desktop virtualisation thereby cutting on cost of operation and saving on power, space and management”, he said.

Enterprises are now becoming aware of virtualization and the value proposition it brings. “They are now checking out - Where is the noise and where is the reality”, referring to promises made and actual delivery, said Thyagarajan, whose firm is in talks with 15 potential clients in this space.

Server virtualization is also taking place simultaneously but the uptake in server was not expected to be the same as desktop. Server virtualization was taking place in specific heavy server environment, as it entailed cost.

India is also witnessing the need for IT automation tools, Krishnan said.

“The axiom labour (knowledge labour) is cheap is no longer valid in India”, he said. In India the situation is made worse as knowledge labour is considered cheap but cost of hiring, training, retraining is up and margins are getting smaller.

“In a slowdown story, the use of IT automation helps reduce cost by taking away mundane task and freeing employees to high-value work”, Thyagarajan said.

Quest’s clients in India include Infosys, Wipro, Ranbaxy and Cummins.

A survey revealed that minimum of 30-35% and maximum of 60% of the help desk work had to do with password resetting. Automation tools could help to pass the onus of changing password to the end user, thereby cutting cost of employees to do it and freeing them to do high-value work.

“In dowturn, there are no holy cows and one has to revisit every dollar spend”, he said adding that investing in automation tool could help in cutting down increasing cost. While corporates were exploring the need for automation tools, in government sectors it was PSUs that were looking at it but it would take some time before hardcore government departments get to looking at it”, said Krishnan whose firm is in talks with PSUs for the automation tools.