"I don't think it's a land grab; the whole world isn't going to standardize on client hypervisors over night," said Goldfein.

PC vendors aren't going to choose one client hypervisor over the other, but will wait and see how the market pans out, she said.

Client virtualization is the more immediate opportunity, and VMware is investing a lot of energy in that space, which started to take off last year, according to Goldfein.

The adoption barriers will have to be lowered even further for the technology to go mainstream, including making the user experience better when running the desktop on the server over. To achieve that VMware is investing in its own display protocol, which will be developed with Teradici, and out during the second half of 2009.

"PC-over-IP is a protocol that they invented. Today it exists in hardware implementations, and we are collaboration with them on a software-only implementation. We think it's going to be as competitive as any soft protocol on the market," said Goldfein.

VMware chose to work with Teradici because of some of its core technologies, including the algorithms it uses to do compression and adaptive rendering, which detects how much bandwidth the user has and adopts on the fly, according to Goldfein.

But still, the performance will get much better when backed it up with hardware acceleration.

"We think that if that model becomes more cost effective it's really going to transform what we today think of as state of the art of remote display protocols," said Goldfein.

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