'Make user experience your prime objective’ states new desktop virtualization research

User experience is critical to the success of virtualized workspace deployments according to a new commissioned study released by Forrester Consulting.

The survey recommends that organizations planning on a virtualization project invest in better tools: “Fundamentals still matter, so be generous in your server density planning and invest in tools that will make managing profiles, privileges, and policies easier. Invest in areas that will accelerate user acceptance, such as application and personality persistence, elevated rights management for installing software, and employee self-service”.

Ravi Khatod, SVP of Marketing for AppSense said: “These findings highlight the importance of building user experience into any virtualization deployment from the start. As such, UEM is a critical part of an overall virtualization deployment, and why AppSense and Citrix seamlessly integrate across all product including the recently launched XenDesktop 7.6.”

Calvin Hsu, VP of product marketing, Desktops and Apps Group, from Citrix commented “Customers depend on Citrix and AppSense to deliver the optimal user experience, because our combined solutions provide customers with the flexibility, scalability and performance they demand. Our joint solution ensures our customers benefit from optimized logon times and superior desktop responsiveness, dynamic desktop and application configuration, and seamless roaming between Citrix infrastructure and physical desktops to power a high-value workspace that fuels business productivity.”

The results show when businesses started with the user experience they were more likely to achieve their cost reduction goals. The survey recommends, ‘Make user experience your prime objective.’ Those organizations that delivered successful virtualization projects reported a variety of benefits including faster incident resolution, faster logon times, fewer data breaches, better security and faster disaster recovery. In fact more than half (51%) reported employee productivity had increased when working across multiple devices as a result of virtualization. 60% cited end user satisfaction as a top measure of project success.

Based on the results the study recommended that user experience should be the primary objective of a virtualization deployment, stating: “The value of virtualization comes from improved workforce enablement, not primarily from a reduction in cost. Put employee use cases first when building the plan. And don’t pinch pennies where user experience would be compromised—trading the productivity of the organization as a whole for small gains in IT efficiency is a false economy. Let the usability requirements dictate the architecture, and run the operational cost analysis from there.”

The study also found that overall, 70% of respondents reported they were satisfied with the financial return on investment from their deployments. 40% said application speed and responsiveness was faster since they deployed virtual desktops, with 38% saying speeds equalled the pre-virtualized environment’s performance.

The Forrester research surveyed 300 IT managers and administrators with responsibility for virtual desktop and/or virtual application environments at 1,000+ employee firms in the U.S., UK and Germany in June 2014.