Its not a two horse race.

Who is served when topics are covered incompletely? Is it the writer or consuming public? I tout that neither are well served when this happens, and would submit that it is more often out of insufficient time in a persons schedule that drives this type of behavior. In fact talking about VDI as a stand alone aspect in itself is a challenge to what really occurs in the buying space today. VDI is only one of the many blended ways that Desktop Organizations want to deliver a workspace to an employee. In fact looking at the current onslaught of tablets, smartphones and ever increasing arrays of devices that have compute built in, we can only lay the groundwork for what the Workspace of tomorrow will look like and stand ready for a world of change with pervasive computing.



What does this have to do with two horses? For some time people have been talking about VDI like it was a two horse race to win the hearts and minds of the VDI adopting public. Those two horses of course being VMWare and Citrix. I can understand that any good analysis today might start with these two players, but moving past day one of your analysis I would suspect you would quickly start adding to the horses in the race. Somewhat selfishly I would contend its a least a three horse race, that includes Quest Software. Most desktop teams will tell you that VDI is good for some use cases, but not all. Depending on the problem you are trying to solve, you may keep physical machines for some people, terminal services and even blades for others. For simplicity sake what they really need is all of this, in one simple to use, easy to manage solution. That is why Quests vWorkspace is the only real horse in this race.


While VMWare is doing a great job of seeding licenses into their ELA deals, I am still waiting to hear some noise about any reasonably large deployments of their suite. Let me be clear on the definition of reasonably large as say over 10K seats? Anyone? In fact the word on the street, if the analysts were listening, is that their sales teams wont even spend their own time on it anymore, and instead try to engage specialist partners. Instead attaching View onto their deals they have created an illusion that they are gaining traction, without really getting many seats into production. Do analysts ask what kind of revenues are being obtained, or rather how many production deployed seats are there? Its an important distinction, because it presents a narrow window for View to become critical to an business operations. When that ELA is up for renewal, savvy purchasers will start trimming their renewal license costs by removing this software that is sitting on the shelf. There is no doubt that they have painted a very interesting roadmap, but I have never been able to find an installer that will run and implement roadmaps, they usually need well written code behind them.



Meanwhile Citrix, continues to abuse and mistreat its long time loyal customers with a long practiced licensing scheme, that gives this perception that they are leading the way for VDI. However, dig under those revenue numbers and see what reality looks like. Are customers really phoning up, researching and buying the Citrix VDI solution fresh, or rather being backed into a terminal services license swap instead, and loosing flexibility in the process? Look, I wont argue that for the last 15 years Citrix has enjoyed a virtual monopoly in this field, but as many upgrading customers have found, Citrix is racing to try to re-establish a lead they once had and having to move to a whole new architecture for the product in the process. This is precisely why its a great time for customers to re-evaluate the exorbitant costs they have been spending on Citrix, and explore the possibility of an easier life. And furthering the point on abusive practice, in a point of haste, Citrix has rolled out their v5 product that offers no upgrade path for customers on v4. I of course love moves like this, because its a great time to evaluate alternatives, since the labor and professional services involved to essentially, re-implement and deploy v5 are significant for their customer base.

The disservice done by suggesting this two horse approach, also seems to not look at the normal RFP process. Most companies embarking on an effort like VDI, will usually have at least three bidders minimum when going after a effort of this size and magnitude. So it seems to me like it would only make sense that any critical analysis of this space would also encompass more than two vendors.

The power of choice is found in the Quest vWorkspace solution. Here customers are able to choose their hypervisor, they aren't swayed to use XEN or ESX only. The choices for customers extend way beyond this aspect though as well, in fact choice moves all the way to the client. Quest is the only VDI player today that allows customers to offer a true BYOC program for their employees. If you dig into View or XenDesktop, ask them how their offline VDI works on an Apple and if they support it. When they are done trying to read back the script their Product Marketing team supplied them about ways to talk around the question, just smile at the hard working sales person and give Quest a call.



Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and yes there are more than two horses in this race. In fact there is only one horse that really offers independence, choice and a clean path to true BYOC programs that will change the nature of desktop support that will be provided in the future. It may also be why its growing a 100% year on year, but I wont go there, as thats just bragging.