Coined by VMware president and CEO Paul Maritz, the situation describes the business choice of whether to provide thick or thin clients for employees.

Thick clients give employees a rich set of applications in their desktop environment, but are a management nightmare because applications can be distributed across thousands of PCs that must be provisioned, updated, patched and secured individually.

Thin clients are cheaper, more secure, and more cost-effective to manage, but traditionally have not been able to deliver the richness, flexibility, or compatibility of a thick client. Most businesses provide thin clients only for employees such as call centre staff who can be productive in a more stripped-down environment.

VMware says its system solves the 'desktop dilemma' by combining the benefits of both approaches--delivering rich, personalised virtual desktops to any device (whether thick or thin), while simplifying management and securing endpoints with virtual desktops hosted in the data centre.

IT organisations can 'decouple' a desktop from specific physical devices or locations to create a personalised view of a user's desktop, applications, and data--called 'myView'--that is securely accessible from almost any device, at any time.