May 26th, 2011
Interesting announcement for the desktop virtualization market this week that Citrix has acquired Kaviza. The solution is labeled ‘VDI In-a-Box’ aimed squarely at the SMB market. Why the acquisition? According to Gabe Knuth’s latest review, "The short answer to this is: because XenDesktop is too complex for SMBs”. Our recent survey of over 100 IT buyers evaluating VDI cited complexity as the #2 reason (right behind high startup costs) why they are looking at cloud-hosted VDI instead of on-premise VDI reinforces this rational.
Do SMB’s really want to manage hardware and software deployments if they don’t have to? Many SMB’s don’t even have dedicated IT teams that can manage these installations. I would argue that you should not need any boxes especially for SMB’s and departmental desktop deployments. SMB’s are aggressively looking to the cloud to make their lives easier and more cost effective. SMB’s don’t have the staff or resources to be deploying and managing software and hardware internally regardless of how easy it is.
SMB’s need simplicity, low costs and agility to grow when needed – cloud-hosted desktops offer a much better solution. We are the only purpose built provider of Desktops as a Service (DaaS) and do not require any boxes (hardware or software). We believe this is a much better model for SMB’s – what do you think? We want your feedback - chime in below!
