This is a cautionary tale about the need to carefully examine analyst firm projections and not just highlights of that data, summarized by someone else. Most complaints about analyst projections focus on the wildly optimistic numbers they assign to putative market sizes—you know the "[We] (insert name of analyst firm) estimate the left-handed mouse market will be $17 billion by 2012." If you took all the market projections by all the analyst firms and added them up, they'd probably sum to more than global GDP, leaving no room for all those unimportant sectors of the economy like manufacturing, agriculture, construction, and, of course, pet psychotherapy.

But this post isn't going to complain about over-optimistic analyst projections. Instead, it's about the need to examine them—because in this instance, the analyst firm did a good job of estimation about the financial benefits of virtualization, but their numbers were misquoted, leading someone who would take them at face value to conclude that client virtualization doesn't really offer much financial payback—a conclusion at odds with the firm's actual numbers, a disservice to its work, and misleading to anyone who was looking for help to decide whether to pursue a client virtualization strategy.

The story: I received a whitepaper on virtualization. I won't disclose the source, as it was clear during my quest for information that this whitepaper was little more than a compendium, a pastiche of information lifted from different sources, put together by someone without any familiarity with the subject. So, discretion will be the watchword here. In any case, the originator of the paper is less relevant than the point of this post, which is the need to carefully evaluate the information you review when making decisions.

The whitepaper covered a number of different aspects of virtualization, all with a positive perspective on the benefits of the technology. One fact cited in the paper really stuck out at me: On the first page, in the "Key Findings" box, the paper noted "Firms could save GBP 78,000 (USD 159, 000) for every 1,000 PCs a year by replacing the full desktop PC kit with a server-hosted desktop virtualization set up."

I looked at that and thought, "Hang on a second: $159K savings for 1,000 PCs? That's only $159 per year per PC! That's not much of an argument for client virtualization." I sat down with a calculator and figured out that, at loaded personnel costs, that meant that client virtualization would only save around four hours of labor per client. In my opinion, that level of payback wouldn't justify pursuing client virtualization. And of course, there are a number of other areas that should offer payback from client virtualization (I addressed them in earlier posts here and here ). So $159 per machine wouldn't really justify pursuing client virtualization as an option.