As the economy continues to turn south there is a lot more pressure building around the cost of managing IT. Interest in keeping IT costs down has been a continuous focus. But the fact of the matter is that it's becoming a higher priority.
Unfortunately, the highest cost associated with IT these days is labor. That means that most of the costs saving initiatives that are going to be launched in the coming months are going to focus on reducing the cost of labor. Given that focus it stands to reason that one of the places that IT managers are going to focus most on is reducing the amount of labor required to manage all the desktops and notebooks that pervade the organization.
To that end don't be surprised if IT managers start talking more about using virtualization technologies on the client. The basic idea would be to provide a higher level of abstraction above the operating system on the client that would be easier to manage.
You might argue that mastering virtualization technology on the client might be more complicated than running your existing systems as is. But what virtualization technology on the client will allow IT managers to think about doing more aggressively is relying on managed service providers to manage the all the clients. For example, MokaFive is a new startup company that is selling a virtualization offering for the client that can be managed as a service. They might be one of the first companies to do this but chances are that VMware, Citrix and Microsoft are right behind them.
Ultimately what this means is that new approaches to managing client systems that might have been coming our way based on an evolutionary model are probably going to get here a lot sooner thanks to demands for a lower cost approach to managing computing. Like all technological innovations, the advent of virtualization on the client will have both positive and negative consequences a lot sooner than later for all concerned.