I've been experiencing a strange sensation lately. It's a little hard to explain; it's like all of a sudden I can see a white elephant in the room that no one else sees. Then I wonder if I'm seeing things, or folks just don't notice their own behavior. Since I'm a big believer in self awareness, I'm assuming I haven't gone totally bonkers (though after a week at PEX some folks might disagree). Wondering what white elephant I'm talking about? Here goes: Simplicity seems to be out of style.

Let me explain. I've been talking to a number of customers lately about VDI solutions that seem to want to concentrate on their most difficult use cases first. I think it's perfectly sensible to concentrate on a difficult use case when you're experiencing significant pain. But when you're exploring VDI for desktop innovation, I can't understand why more customers don't focus more on simple use cases that enable them to explore and build capabilites in technology, process, and knowledge.

But I think this is to be expected of customers, and as a career consultant, I've made a good living from helping customers find a sensible way to break down complex problems into managable chunks. But I'm seeing this behavior manifested across the table--in the folks that would ordinarily reign in this customer tendancy to tackle the most difficult tasks first.

I think it's because VDI is evolving so fast. The insane pace of innovation in virtualization technology of the last three years has made routine out of doing the impossible, so after a few big wins in VDI, customers are thinking that their most challenging situations are just within grasp. "Five hundred users accessing centralized desktops over a 512K frame relay link from India with 300ms latency? No problem--we have a VM for that!"

Here's my appeal to my partners, consultants, and sales folks in the field: Unless you're working witha customer that has identified active pain for a complex use case, suggest a "walk before you run" approach of starting with the simplest use cases first, a.k.a., the "low hanging fruit.". Some expamples of low hanging fruit are knowledge workers who don't travel or telecommute from the moon, call center workers that don't use desktop-integrated VoIP telephony, and work-from-home intitiatives for employees with VPN access and reliable broadband connectivity. There are many more examples, but the key is getting your customer to see the sensibility of starting with the low hanging fruit and developing confidence and experience with the technology and the impact of VDI on their existing processes.

Virtual Hosted Desktop technology is attracting incredible amounts of investment by all players, large and small, and with really good reason: The market is enormous. Gartner puts the total number of desktops in the marketplace between 550 and 650 milllion, and even when you segment the market into geographies and industry verticals there are still significant opportunities for revenue and profit. But all this tells me is that now more than ever it's important to ease into VDI without overreaching. Customer expectations are very high, and perhaps set too high. VDI is a great fit for many use cases--the key to success for a consultancy in this market is to guide customers into making the right investments for the right reasons.

Oh, and by the way--don't look now, but there's a white elephant eating your peanuts.