The big, if not unexpected, news of Citrix Summit is that Citrix has decided to make good on its past investment in Kaviza by buying it outright. This is a clear win-win situation for Citrix, Kaviza, the channel and customers.
As awareness of desktop virtualization increases in smaller organizations, potential adopters put off by the complexity of XenDesktop will tend to consider Quest vWorkspace and VMware View as the de facto alternatives. Kaviza’s VDI-in-a-Box, regardless of how good it is, is a higher risk choice because Kaviza is a startup and statistically speaking startups tend to fail.
That was this morning, but now Kaviza is a small part of a much larger business that has proven success in desktop virtualization. Any perceived adoption risk has gone, and VDI-in-a-Box can compete on its merits alone.
Citrix has always positioned XenDesktop as being targeted at deployments above 500 seats so had no offering for the SME market. The acquisition of Kaviza gives Citrix the ability to compete in both the large enterprise and SME markets with solutions designed specifically to support both, whereas Quest and VMware have to position their respective solutions to fit all environments. Citrix has said that it intends to make few changes within Kaviza at present, indicating only that Kaviza will gain full access to the entire HDX stack, giving it significant benefits beyond what it can already deliver using the basic HDX features it has access to today.
I’ll provide an update next week when I know more.
[...] be offered with Citrix is newest desktop virtualization solution VDI-in-a-Box that it acquired with Kaviza last [...]