The worldwide hosted virtual desktop (HVD) market will accelerate through 2013 to reach 49 million units, up from more than 500,000 units in 2009, according to Gartner Inc. Worldwide HVD revenue will grow from about $1.3 billion to $1.5 billion in 2009, which is less than 1 percent of the worldwide professional PC market, to $65.7 billion in 2013, which will be equal to more than 40 percent of the worldwide professional PC market.

The IT consultancy said HVDs would have a major impact on the PC industry as enterprises that previously purchased high volumes of PCs on a regular basis would now look to replace them with less-expensive devices and replace them less frequently.

"PC vendors must prepare for the growth in demand for this client computing architecture by adjusting sales strategies and compensation models or they risk losing expenditure share with enterprise customers," said Annette Jump, research director at Gartner. "Distributed computing has been the dominant client computing architecture for the past 15 to 20 years, but a number of changes in the way users can access applications and client computing capabilities are bringing a number of alternative architectures to the fore."

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