Citrix had a busy year with notable acquisitions in the form of Kaviza, cloud.com and most recently App-DNA. Setting aside cloud.com as not being immediately relevant to desktop virtualization; in acquiring Kaviza and App-DNA, Citrix is directly addressing the two most important concerns that potential adopters of desktop virtualization have expressed – complexity and vendor maturity.
Joe Onisick highlighted this concern in a comment on my post on Cisco’s ability to create an inflection point in VDI adoption by saying
All the companies and tools you mention are great for VDI deployments, but is an infrastructure that requires 5-6+ vendors just to deliver a desktop really the house of cards you want to run your business on?
I totally agree with Joe on this point, the number of technology layers needed to deliver a comprehensive VDI service is a daunting prospect and the fact that many of the key technologies needed to deliver this service have been developed by startups is a very valid concern. Having said that, I’m more bullish about the ability of the leading vendors to recognize and address this issue and see Citrix’s acquisition of Kaviza and App-DNA as evidence of this. Even so Citrix cannot afford to stop here; further work is needed to simplify VDI to the point where it can compete with distributed desktop virtualization solutions. Which is why another of Citrix’s 2011 initiatives is so important.
In September 2011 Citrix opened the doors of the Citrix Startup Accelerator. Lead by Citrix veteran Michael Harries and John McIntyre who has a long track record of developing early stage technology companies; the Startup Accelerator is Citrix’s technology incubator. Hosting 12 startups in its offices in Santa Clara with space and funding for more in 2012, the Startup Accelerator is fostering the development of a broad range of technologies that fall both within and well outside of Citrix’s current markets – I’ll be running a series of podcasts starting in the new year with members of the Startup accelerator program, starting with Canadian company GridCentric who will soon be playing a big role in the future of VDI. Citrix CEO Mark Templeton hinted at the importance of GridCentric in his keynote at Cirix Synergy Barcelona in October by forecasting the the cost of VDI would fall below that of a conventional managed desktop PC in 2012. Mark must have a better crystal ball than me because I don’t see the cost of VDI falling quite that far, but theres no doubt that he was thinking of GridCentric when he announced that forecast, and that brings me to my third reason for highlighting Citrix’s contribution to desktop virtualization in 2011.
While GridCentric was not explicitly called out in Templeton’s keynote, he did announce that Citrix was leading an initiative to develop a System-on-a-Chip reference architecture for thin clients supporting the Citrix HDX remote display protocol, with the promise that this would dramatically reduce the cost of thin-client devices. It won’t be until about the time of Synergy 2012 in San Francisco that we will get to see the results of this initiative, but for the moment I’m willing to trust that this will go some of the way to getting the cost of VDI down to a more palatable level.
Finally Citrix also signed a major partnership agreement with Cisco which will go a long way to push VDI into large enterprise markets – Cisco will be featured later in this series.
Just to provide a bit of balance; it wasn’t all roses for Citrix in 2011. Marketing is still a mess – Citrix caused no end of confusion in the channel with its inability to communicate the respective positioning of XenDesktop and VDI-in-a-box, and the perennial problem of feature/product naming confusion has still not been cured. Worse, it willfully ignores certain key technologies where it should and could easily compete. Still, in acting as it has by simplifying and lowering the cost of VDI while fostering innovation through the Startup Accelerator, Citrix deserves a place in my top 10.
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