Why VMware and Teradici's VDI Protocol Is a Threat to Citrix
I had an insightful discussion yesterday with Stuart Robinson over at Teradici. I wanted to speak with the company for a feature I’m working on about its
partnership with VMware, announced at VMworld back in September. The discussion led me down some of the slightly tortuous technology pathways associated with display protocols. (This stuff is not for the faint of heart and I'm as much of a gearhead as the next guy.)
Stuart filled me in on the details about PC-over-IP, the company's display protocol, the crown jewel that led VMware to pursue the co-development and licensing deal. But one item that grabbed my attention had to do with network performance. Generally, display protocol performance improvements can focus on one of three areas: host processing, client processing and what happens in between (i.e. the network). One of PCoIP's sweet spots is that it has an embedded optimization algorithm for dynamic adjustments to network performance. Teradici claims that this is something that Citrix ICA simply can't do.
The deal with VMware involves perfecting this LAN/WAN optimization feature even further. In terms of competition with Citrix, this is a big deal since ICA, as good as the protocol is, is not optimized in this fashion (or so claims Teradici). More to the point, Citrix has an array of products that it sells to address LAN/WAN optimization, the implications of which should be fairly obvious.
Posted by Tom Valovic on 01/21/2009 at 12:49 PM