After spending the last 6 months researching emerging technologies around the IT Client platform, I have identified two must have technologies when considering your client refresh.  The first is Solid State Hard disks.  While the cost is a concern at initial glance, the benefit you receive from this technology is incredible.  We have seen benefits such as no more hard drive failures do to failures from moving parts.  Increased performance from faster machine startup and resume times.  Increased application responsiveness from quicker access on a SSD versus traditional platform.  Fragmented hard drives become an issue of the past and you can now save costs on 3rd party defrag tools and/or custom solutions you develop in house.  These are just some of the many benefits we have seen, for more in depth review check out our recently released whitepaper - http://communities.intel.com/docs/DOC-2524. But beyond all of these benefits are the ones you may need in the future.  As IT moves to more and more of a Virtualized Client environment, technologies like these help make adoption much easier.  When testing the Solid State Disks, we noticed that our Virtualized IT environment running in a traditional Type-2 Client Hypervisor actually ran 27% faster than the same virtual environment on a traditional platter based drive.  This brings me to the next technology, VT-d.  This is the next evolution in client support of virtualization.  While todays more common systems have VT-x, VT-d is now available on many newer systems today.  VT-s offers what we refer to as "direct pass through" interface for virtual machines to communicate with the system hardware.  What this means for you is that you can have a virtualized OS that can talk directly to certain parts of your systems hardware without having to go through a virtualization layer in a Host OS.  This will also enable better use of Type-1 Hypervisors or "Native Client" hypervisors that will allow side by side, on at the same time OS operation on a single platform.  Imagine being able to support a corporate and personal build on the same machine but keeping them isolated from each other.  This opens the door to a host of possibilities for future IT shops.  Not all of these technologies are ready to run full speed today, but with most shops carrying a 2-3 year refresh cycle, it is important to buy the right technologies at the right time so when you want to deploy these, you have systems that support them.  So make sure you check these two technologies out and get them into your client roadmap as soon as possible.