Paul Ghostine is co-founder and CEO of Provision, which provides management software for virtual client environments, be they server-based computing (SBC), shared or dedicated remote desktop implementations. As such, his Virtual Access Suite competes with Citrix Desktop Server, but since Provision was spun out in 2004 from Emergent OnLine, a Citrix Platinum Partner, he reckons to have some insight into the thinking in Fort Lauderdale.
Ghostine described two drivers behind Citrix’s acquisition of XenSource. Firstly, Citrix has always wanted to be a platform, he began. With [their flagship SBC product] Presentation Server, they still depend on Microsoft Terminal Services, while with Desktip Server, they’ve depended on a virtual infrastructure from VMware or XenSource, so now they own an entire stack.
Secondly, he went on, there is the threat from VMware. SBC has been around for ten years and is now almost viewed as legacy, so Citrix has lost a lot of mindshare among resellers due to virtualization, he argued. If you put calls into CIOs saying you want to seel them acces, which is where Citrix made its name, perhaps one in ten would return your calls. With a virtualization message, nine out of ten will call back.
That said, he was sceptical as to Citrix’s ability to make inroads into a market which, he believed, will be owned 90% by VMware and Microsoft, once it comes out with its own hypervisor, codenamed Veridian. The Xen hypervisor is open source, so what Citrix is buying is a set of management tools for it, with a chance of getting no more than 10% market share, he opined.
Provision’s business model is to ally closely with all the virtualization vendors, in particular VMware, but also Microsoft with its Virtual Server/Veridian, SWsoft, Novell and even XenSource, prior to its acquisition by Citrix. Of course, VMware itself upped its competitive stance with Citrix earlier this year with its acquisition of connection broker developer Propero. Provision, along with companies such as Leostream and Dunes, also offers a connection broker, while Citrix has its own within Desktop Server, but like Dunes, it regards its main value add as residing elsewhere. In Provision’s case, that is in the area of management.
We do more than just a connection broker to ship with [VMware’s] VirtualCenter, said Ghostine. We integrate with their product to offer provisioning, cloning form a single template, app publishing into the instances and the application of access control policies, all the way to full app virtualization, with integration into app streaming vendors such as Microsoft’s Softricity.
He argued that the VMware acquisition of Propero, is a good thing, firstly because it validates the market, where previously Virtual Desktop Infrastructure providers have all been small start-ups, and secondly, because it sets up their stance against Citrix. He did not see it as a threat to his own business, because we’re in a very different space.
