Organisations will deliver twice as many applications remotely compared with 2015, claims Gartner.
"Organisations will centralise a number of applications over the next three years to enable platform- independent computing," said Nathan Hill, research director at Gartner.
"As platform-specific Windows applications dip below a certain threshold and become a "manageable minority" - that is 20 to 30 percent of the application portfolio - organisations will find it increasingly financially and operationally attractive to ring-fence all of them using device-independent delivery options."
This is a continuation of using centralised delivery architectures to deliver legacy applications, but it also signals a watershed where the remaining business-critical and platform-dependent applications (that cannot be replaced) must be shifted to allow user-centric computing to evolve at the faster pace that users and software vendors are demanding.
By 2018, reckons Gartner, touchscreens will be shipped on one third of all notebooks.
As the incremental price for touch decreases, it will become more normalised as a default feature for notebooks.
Pricing is expected to get much more competitive in the second half of 2016 as manufacturing processes continue to improve and Windows 10 migration planning starts to accelerate.
By 2018, 30% of enterprises will spend more on display screens than on PCs.
According to Gartner, in the digital workplace users will demand more screen real estate for their workspaces and this will bring forth both higher resolution screens and more of them, leading to scenarios where more money is spent on display screens than on the PC itself.
"All of these trends portend a new employee workspace that is more mobile, more capable of working more naturally with humans, and, overall, more productive and secure," said Ken Dulaney, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.
"Endpoint support staff must rethink the workspace and work with suppliers to rearchitect and re-cost standards.
"From an IT perspective, Windows 10 and the move of applications to the back end will dramatically change how those applications are delivered to employees.
"Updates will be more frequent, more incremental and less obvious to the end user. Software vendors and internal IT have much to do to adapt to this new model and to move away from the image management model for PCs of today."