Citrix Survey: Higher Education Turns to Desktop Virtualization to Meet Top Challenges

An annual higher education survey conducted by Citrix found desktop virtualization gaining ground as an important technology solution for colleges and universities. Eighty-two percent of approximately 200 higher education IT professionals expressed a clear interest in adding desktop virtualization to their institution’s virtualization profile. The survey was administered during two influential higher education conferences: the League for Innovation in the Community Colleges’ 2009 Conference on Information Technology (CIT), held in October, and the 2009 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, held in November.

According to the survey, respondents reported that their top academic computing challenges were:

• Lack of adequate IT resources (70 percent);
• Time-consuming maintenance of desktops and applications such as upgrades, patches, etc. (66 percent); and,
• Changing student and faculty demand including access from home or other off-school locations (62 percent).

Scottsdale Community College addressed these issues by implementing desktop virtualization from Citrix in 2009. The college has seen dramatic cost savings and productivity gains from the project, which gives nearly 12,000 students and staff free access to software applications, personal files and network resources from any computer with Internet access.

“With Citrix XenDesktop, our virtualization solution saves us approximately $250,000 per year, gives our IT team the bandwidth to work on more projects and gives all of our faculty and students easy access to the software and data they need to succeed,” said Dustin Fennell, chief information officer for Scottsdale Community College. “Desktop virtualization presents a real benefit to our students and it makes good business sense for the college.”

“Higher education has embraced virtualization to meet academic computing challenges,” said David Podwojski, director of government, education and health for Citrix. “Desktop virtualization addresses the higher education IT concerns of cost, secure student access and demands on the IT team. This technology is poised to become the education IT solution of choice for campuses across the country.”

The survey also revealed that higher education experts expect significant benefits from the implementation of virtualization. This year’s respondents indicated that the creation of a virtual computer lab could provide three key advantages:

• Enable easy delivery of semester-based instructional applications and resources (66 percent);
• Reduce costs by eliminating the need to maintain the physical lab and upgrade equipment (65 percent); and,
• Free IT personnel to work on other projects (59 percent).

According to Podwojski, this consistency validates the survey’s findings in terms of the technology issues that are top-of-mind in higher education.

“This annual survey is a part of our commitment to doing everything we can to improve industry’s understanding of the challenges and needs of higher education,” said Podwojski. “Desktop virtualization is the single most important technology for education in 2010. With Citrix XenDesktop and the new Citrix education licensing program, customers can now adopt the technology for campus-wide use as a very cost-effective solution.”