Citrix acquires RingCube
In the last 24 hours, Citrix has announced their acquisition of RingCube, a small vendor focused on user personalization technology for virtual desktops. The innovative technology from RingCube accelerates virtual desktop adoption by eliminating the tradeoff between user personalization and centralized IT management. When combined with a desktop virtualization product like Citrix XenDesktop(R), RingCube makes it easier for IT to give each user a personalized virtual desktop, dramatically reduces the cost of storage, and simplifies the move from physical to virtual desktops. With the acquisition of RingCube, Citrix further solidifies its leadership position in desktop virtualization, helping enterprise customers transform traditional desktop management into a secure, flexible "private desktop cloud" service. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
What’s the big deal? Why bother? Up until now, a major challenge in a truly personalized VDI experience meant state based, or personal VDI architecture. This is not sustainable, cost effective, or the way to get ROI out of a VDI implementation. To borrow a friends analogy, the VDI dream, of course, was to go towards a more “stateless” or pooled VDI environment, one in which every user spun their VM off of a single “golden” image and upon logoff, any and all changes that the user made were, in a word, poof — deleted. Hence “stateless”. But that wasn’t very effective either, since the user balked at having to recreate their settings and configurations at every logon. Imagine going into your home day after day and every time you opened the front door you had to reconfigure your lights, your appliances, your furniture, your decorations. Not very effective; in fact, quite the time killer.
RingCube and RES Workspace Manager have some overlap in the fact that they both change the way that Windows stores IT configuration and user personalization. However, the main technical difference is that while RingCube does abstract configuration and personalization away from a specific Windows host, it does not store that state independently of the Windows User Profile. This means that RingCube is subject to many of the limitations of the Windows profile architecture and more importantly, cannot control settings and resource access at a granular level. Conversely, Workspace Manager stores all its configuration on a per application basis outside of the Windows profile, and therefore cannot not only atomically control those settings but also, through a comprehensive security model, can grant or remove access to specific applications, files, network resources or administrator privileges based on user context (including factors like location, device type, delivery model and time of day). Here is some more information on RES and Citrix.
This is an interesting acquisition, and further places Citrix as a market leader in Client Virtualization technologies. It will be interesting to see what happens to the RingCube brand, and how it gets released in something like XenDesktop.
Happy Virtualizing.
Jeff Wettlaufer
Sr. Director, Product Marketing, RES Software
