IBM Climbs At Least To $185 On Virtualization Push

On Monday, IBM launched the Virtual Desktop for Smart Business, a new workforce mobility offering that provides anytime, anywhere access to personal desktops from mobile devices - including tablets, netbooks, laptops and thin customers. [1] IBM’s offering has come at a crucial point as desktop virtualization adoption picks up among businesses.

The market is already dominated

While the market is already dominated by competitors like VMware and Citrix, we believe IBM’s brand recognition and large network of business partners will help its easy-to-use and so then-priced product to gain share in the desktop virtualization market.

IBM plans to offer virtual computing solutions to smaller companies, giving these companies greater agility and lowering bot the cost and complexity of managing their PC environment. IBM Virtual Desktop will allow Windows or Linux desktops to be hosted and managed centrally, enabling rapid deployment of new applications, automatic software updates and a reduction in help desk requests.

Also, the fact that IBM's VDI solution can either be hosted in the customer data center or through an IBM partner's private cloud environment should facilitate adoption. IBM as well has many midsize businesses as customers, which typically lack the IT resources and time required to manage a traditional PC environment.

Drag the trend line in the modifiable chart above to see how various trends in middleware license earnings could affect IBM's stock value.