Dear Employee:

As part of our company's move to virtual desktop environments, the IT department will no longer buy laptops. Instead, employees will receive a $3,000 stipend to purchase a laptop, provided it meets our baseline memory and processing power requirements. It will be your machine to keep whether you stay with the company or not, but you will have responsibility for arranging for hardware support through your vendor.

Sincerely,

Your IT manager

Gartner Inc. is telling attendees at its annual data center conference in Las Vegas this week that it expects companies to increasingly virtualize desktop environments to improve PC management and security. An offshoot of that trend may be a shift to employee ownership of the hardware.