Earlier today, Cisco introduced an expanded portfolio of desktop virtualization solution architectures, based on Cisco UCS, that extend Cisco's value proposition, solution breadth and market reach.  This is very important for our partner ecosystem, which continues to be the foundation for selling Cisco's Desktop Virtualization Solutions.

Desktop virtualization continues to gain traction.  According to a recent Gartner forecast, companies are projected to add 59 million more virtual desktop users worldwide between 2013 and 2016. Despite that growth, we found that significant challenges remain for getting VDI implementations off the ground.  These include:

• Up-front CAPEX often associated with upgrading the data center and network infrastructure required to support VDI
• Complexity associated with combining multiple disparate technologies together in a way that's cohesive and easy to manage
• Guesswork and risk associated with ensuring that the success seen in a small pilot is replicated in larger production environments

Cisco and its strategic partners Citrix, EMC, NetApp and VMware, have been successfully enabling organizations to reap the benefits of VDI for years, with over 1,200 customers and hundreds of thousands of customer seats in production today.  (You can learn more about our architectures and many of our newer capabilities through our recent webinar, Eliminating the Guesswork With Optimized Architectures for VDI.)

Thanks to our expanded ecosystem, which now includes technologies from Atlantis Computing, Fusion-io, Nexenta, Nimble Storage, Tegile and others in progress, we're delivering a portfolio of reference architectures that offer VDI customers the best fit for their IT environment and implementation use cases.

I encourage you to learn more about this exciting new portfolio of VDI architectures by checking out the assets below. 

• Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solutions At-a-Glance
• Solution Overview
• Cisco Desktop Virtualization Solutions
• VMware Reference Architectures
• Citrix Reference Architectures
• Cisco Validated Designs for VDI

Please also check out the Cisco webinar "Customer Insights: Desktop Virtualization On Your Terms"

Our featured guests include:

• Jim McHugh, VP UCS Marketing, Cisco -Moderator
• Mark Balch, Director UCS Product Management, Cisco
• David Johnson, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
• Charles Rosse, Virtualization Team Lead, Baptist Memorial HealthCare
• Udaya Kiran, Global Solutions Lead, Wipro Technologies
• Robert Dixon, Director of Information Technology, University of Colorado, Boulder

Look for continued innovation from Cisco and its partners as we jointly improve the VDI implementation experience for our customers and help our partners build profitable VDI practices. Leave a comment and let us know what you think.