According to a new IDC study, IT departments in 2009 will face fierce pressure to reduce costs, while at the same time IT environments will become more complex than ever before, with more mobile workers and devices, increased reliance on offshore employees, new security threats, and spiraling costs around management, support, and maintenance.

Desktop virtualization is a term creating lots of buzz for offerings in the industry, by offering businesses the ability to solve many of these problems and reduce IT costs. One of the newest, and most promising, approaches to desktop virtualization is virtual distributed desktops, which offers the core benefits of virtualization while remaining cheap to deploy and supporting both fixed-desk and mobile workers.

To help businesses make the right decisions about centralized virtual desktops (CVDs), IDC conducted a competitive analysis looking at both the technology features and market ecosystems of four of the leading vendors in the space.

IDC found that from a technological perspective RingCube offered some of the best features currently available, while VMware held the strongest marketing position and ecosystem. MokaFive delivered a strong product with excellent management features and Sentillion provided a solution with a high degree of security.