Citrix To Offer Client Virtualization Solution
I was joking with a former IDC colleague the other day that I seem to see more folks from IDC's Enterprise Computing Group (my former business unit) now than when I was there. Of course, analysts are on the road or working from home more often than not. But I recently had an enjoyable lunch with John Humphreys and Julie Geer from Citrix at our usual business hangout, Legal Seafoods. John was up until recently covering the virtualization market for IDC but is now senior director of solutions marketing with Citrix, with responsibilities that cut across a number of different business units there.
John had some interesting observations to make on a number of topics. We talked quite a bit about Citrix' cloud strategy and he pointed out that most of the cloud providers (including Amazon EC2) today are using Xen Open Source hypervisors and many have developed their own management systems. This is an opportunity for Citrix to upsell products like its Workflow Studio and Netscaler.
He also mentioned that Citrix has plans to add a local client virtualization product in Q1 which could address a critical issue we've discussed here before -- i.e. knowledge workers not accepting VDI because they're used to customizing their PCs with personal programs, gadgets and Web 2.0 resources. (See "Two IT Trends on a Collision Course".) A partitioning hypervisor on the PC or laptop would in effect keeps the corporate "half" of the PC unsullied and at the same time give the end user his or her own sandbox to use for whatever applications were deemed useful -- in theory, a win-win for both the end user and IT staff which would have far less labor-intensive maintenance to perform.
What do you think? Is this the answer to the so-called "desktop dilemma" as VMware likes to call it? Post here or shoot me an e-mail.
Posted by Tom Valovic on 12/10/2008 at 12:49 PM