"PC vendors must prepare for the growth in demand for this client computing architecture by adjusting sales strategies and compensation models or they risk losing expenditure share with enterprise customers," said Annette Jump, research director at Gartner.

"Distributed computing has been the dominant client computing architecture for the past 15 to 20 years, but a number of changes in the way users can access applications and client computing capabilities are bringing a number of alternative architectures to the fore.

"Hosted virtual desktops are currently the most visible of these alternative architectures and HVD adoption is likely to be rapid during the next three to five years, particularly in mature markets where existing data center and network infrastructures will be used to offset the cost of entry," said Brian Gammage, vice president and Gartner fellow.

This trend will have a major impact on the PC industry where enterprises that previously purchased high volumes of desktop PCs on a regular basis will now look to replace some desktop PCs with less-expensive devices and replace them less frequently. However, while PC hardware expenditure will fall in this scenario, these enterprises will require more servers, network bandwidth and software to support the new architectures.

Gartner estimates that approximately 15 percent of current worldwide traditional professional desktop PCs will migrate to HVDs by 2014, equal to about 66 million connected devices. The U.S. will reach double that of the worldwide average with over 18 million connected devices. After an initial slow start, the HVD market will rally in 2010 and 2011.