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Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is hot, as many midmarket and enterprise businesses adopt the technology to drive down costs and increase manageability of complex systems. VDI is also a nice complement to consumer devices that are exploding in use. And, of course, the technology has significant security advantages for safeguarding data and applications.

VDI adoption is skyrocketing, with the cumulative market projected to exceed $2 billion this year, according to some analysts. But, some vendors and users believe the technology is held back because of its complexity, cost of management and time to deploy and operationalize.

Quest Software, a portfolio company focused on the growing opportunities in systems management, virtualization and security, is looking to attract more midmarket and enterprise customers through partners with its vWorkspace 7.5, a VDI solution that boasts lower costs and greater manageability.

vWorkspace 7.5 is designed with new caching and deployment technologies that improve input/output speeds by 99 percent, instant provisioning that allows for near-instantaneous deployments and new sessions, and new “automated desktop clouds” that increase scalability and speed to provisioning scores of VDI users.

Quest is also including new features like support for Microsoft Lync and Office Communicator, as well as a number of other communication and collaboration technologies, two-factor authentication for security, and an RD Session host that enables the provisioning of multiple images near instantaneously.

“Quest vWorkspace 7.5 introduces a game-changing set of features and advances to enable companies of all sizes to adopt desktop virtualization by taking advantage of one of the lowest cost solutions available. In fact, our research tells us that vWorkspace 7.5 could save organizations as much as 33 percent of their VDI CapEx cost per user compared to competing products,” says Jon Rolls, vice president of product management in Quest’s User Workspace Management group.

Quest supports most of the virtualization software vendors, but is linking its fortunes to Microsoft’s Hyper-V. Microsoft and Quest are longtime partners, and many of Quest’s management products support Windows infrastructure. But it’s more than a legacy relationship at work here; Microsoft Hyper-V is making tremendous progress toward denting VMware’s market dominance.

VDI is something many vendors are racing to embrace as end users look for technologies that increase their management capabilities and decrease the costs of endpoints. Wyse, Citrix and Cisco last year announced a relationship in which the three companies built and supported VDI deployments with optimized bandwidth management and greater integrated communications and collaboration capabilities.

Last week, VDI specialist Unidesk announced the addition of new management and maintenance features to its products and training and enablement programs for its partners following accelerated sales growth. The company is trying to break out with the support of partners such as Dell and Presidio to compete against the VDI market leaders.

As VDI interest increases, more vendors will look to increase their value through cost-containment, manageability and native productivity applications – just as Quest and others have done. The intent is to make VDI as attractive – if not more so – than conventional endpoints. The return value to vendors and solution providers comes in the form of service and support contracts that are far more valuable than perpetual licensing.