With both desktop and application streaming, the provisioned operating system and applications use the client's local resources, without the overhead of permanent installation on the client. For example, financial services firm Russell Investments Group saw application deployment shrink from four weeks to 1.5 weeks after it began using Microsoft's SoftGrid, says Greg Nelson, an IT analyst at the company.

Typically, a set of stub services is transferred to the local cache at connection time, and other resources are streamed as needed. "When you run an application, you need only 15 to 20 percent to start using it, so it can be network-delivered," says David Grescher, director of marketing for SoftGrid at Microsoft.

Streaming does delay initial application access, acknowledges Bill Washburn, operations analyst at California State University at San Marcos, which uses Altiris' technology. "But once the application is installed, people say it's the best they've ever seen it run," he says.

Russell Investments' Nelson says that although desktop and application streaming should theoretically use more network resources than terminal services do, that's not always the case. For example, printing and working with large files can swamp the network in a traditional terminal services architecture. Desktop and application streaming can avoid that by using local printers and local storage.

Simplifying management