One of the long-simmering areas of tension between IT people and the end users they serve has been over the concept of the locked-down PC.

From an IT person's perspective, the PC is a corporate asset. That means that nothing should really be allowed to happen on that PC that could prove to be a threat to the company. The definition of that threat can range from malware infecting the system to the installation of third-party applications that not only suck up precious memory and storage, but typically prove to be unstable. In any of these scenarios, the use of the PC for personal reasons inevitably leads to a trouble ticket for the help desk.

Understandably, the call to the help desk is a cost that IT people want to avoid, so many of them have instituted locked-down PC policies that prevent end users from installing software on the PC or surfing sites that are known to contain large amounts of malware. As a side benefit, these locked-down PCs also go a long way towards helping the company comply with any number of regulations.

But in reality, most end users won't stand for this draconian approach to managing PCs. In the end, many of the best and brightest will go work some where else because the negative perception that a locked-down PC policy creates becomes a symbol of an overly oppressive work environment.

Against this backdrop, it's well-worth noting a new desktop virtualization partnership between Citrix and Intel. The two companies have agreed to embed Citrix virtualization technology alongside Intel vPro systems management software on Intel PC-class processors, which should start showing up in PCs in the second half of this year.

Why this is significant is that is makes it a whole lot more practical to think about partitioning the PC environment. With virtualization technology embedded in the PC, it become simpler to lock down a portion of the PC environment for corporate applications, while still allowing users to use the rest of the system for their personal applications.

As the number of processors in the PC continues to increase and amount of bandwidth available increases, this approach towards creating a virtual locked-down PC environment becomes pretty compelling.

Eventually, Citrix executives theorize that end users might want to buy their own PCs for use at work, rather than rely on their company to give them a PC that usually limits what they can effectively do with their personal applications. That may require some significant changes to the definition of a non-reimbursed business expense in terms of the tax code, but that may be just the kind of change we need to help jumpstart the PC business again.

Regardless of what happens with the tax code, the simple fact of the matter is that by embedding virtualization in the client, Intel is effectively mitigating many of the performance concerns that some IT people have about desktop virtualization. And in so doing, Intel is also setting the stage for fundamentally changing the economics of PC computing in the enterprise.