The jury is in. All indicators show that the ubiquitous nature of virtualization in the enterprise is a sure bet. The virtualization software market is projected to grow from $810M in 2006 to $1.8B in 2009 [1], and server virtualization adoption is expected to reach 65 percent [2] in 2009. The key drivers for this aggressive adoption of virtualization among enterprises are well understood:

• Server consolidation cuts IT expenditures.
• IT organizations are deploying more service-oriented architecture (SOA).
• IT managers are moving to more data center–centric management and security.

In addition, there are a number of other market forces that drive not only virtualization adoption but also remote access of virtualized applications by users in branch offices. Examples include:

• Global adoption of applications within many enterprises along with a growing remote workforce (over 60 percent of today’s corporate employees work remotely).
• Portal, collaboration, and content technologies enabling remote access to a specific set of applications.
• Growing Internet adoption pushing access to virtualized applications via the Web.

Though the first wave of virtualization is happening within the data center, there is an important correlation between the growth of remote access trends and the adoption of virtualization. The enterprises that are most likely to adopt server virtualization are companies that have more than 100 employees and 9 branch offices, and include 90,000 data centers with an associated 1.1 million branch offices [3].

Given these parallel trends in virtualization and remote access, the branch office seems poised to become the beneficiary of a rich set of virtualized applications and services over a common Internet-based interface, without the headaches and costs of locally managing an IT infrastructure. Sounds like nirvana for remote users within a large virtualized enterprise – or is it?