A cold war continues to exist between IT and end users, Dunlop pointed out. "We are all in it together, we are all trying to make the business successful, but at the end of the day ... IT pros and end users have completely different perspectives," he said.

IT's traditional one-size-fits-all solution drives down costs, protects the environment and increases data security. But standardization doesn't accommodate new devices such as personal laptops and iPhones, he pointed out.

"We are struggling to figure out how to reconcile new challenges with our existing model. The answer is, we need a new model," he said.

Virtualization is the driver for that new computing model in the desktop environment, according to Dunlop, and client virtualization, which brings benefits of centralized manageability and agility, is the key.

"I'm talking about the abstraction of our services, getting those layers abstracted from one another so you can abstract the OS from the hardware, you can abstract the applications from the OS, you can abstract the data from the platform," said Dunlop.