Do you think VMware is catching up to Citrix in the desktop space? Balderdash! Citrix needs to catch up to VMware.
Written on Nov 25 2008
by Brian Madden
I heard an analyst the other day who said that with VMware's View and vClient announcements over the past few months, they were finally starting to catch up to Citrix in the desktop space. "Are you kidding me?" I thought. "The tables are turned. Now it's Citrix who must catch up to VMware!"
Let me qualify that statement. Saying that "Citrix must catch up to VMware in the desktop space" has variable truthiness depending on how you define the words "desktop" and "catch up." For example, if you include TS-based XenApp users in your definition of "desktop," then Citrix's 70 million+ XenApp users dwarf the five or ten people using VMware VDM in production, so Citrix is the undisputed leader. But if you define your desktops as VDI desktops, then it's VMware VDM versus Citrix XenDesktop, which both probably have about the same number of production customers.
This game of semantics also applies to the phrase "catch up." I mean that once the technologies in VMware View 3 and the vClient initiative become real, Citrix will have to catch up with VMware in terms of technical capabilities of the product--not in terms of market share.
To understand this statement, we need to back up a bit. Citrix's current VDI product is XenDesktop. XenDesktop is essentially a version of XenApp that's been rewritten to connect users to single-instance Windows XP or Vista backends instead of terminal servers. It's kind of like XenApp, except the seamless windows application publishing feature has been disabled. (This is something Citrix did on purpose so they wouldn't cannibalize their more lucrative XenApp business.)
I want to repeat this because it's very important: Citrix XenDesktop is just the "single instance" version of Citrix XenApp. Sure, some versions of XenDesktop are bundled with Provisioning Server, XenServer, EdgeSight, and products, but these same products are bundled with some versions of XenApp.
The "problem" with XenDesktop being just the VDI version of XenApp is that XenDesktop is nothing more than an old school server-based computing remote desktop delivery product. In other words, it's the OLD way of thinking about VDI. XenDesktop is what VDI wanted to be in 2003. (Making it all the more tragically ironic that it didn't come out until 2008.)
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