It’s early days in the desktop virtualization market. This is  why:

1. There’s not much activity in this market. The recession didn’t prompt a whole series of companies to start virtualizing their desktops in a mad frenzy of attempted cost-saving, although it’s possible that they may do so in time.
2. VMware isn’t really playing in this market in an aggressive way, for two reasons. First it has better fish to fry and second, it’s VDI approach is currently quite expensive on a per seat basis.
3. Citrix did well to put its mark on this market with the acquisition of Ardence and Xen Source, and also a strong partnership with Microsoft. I thus expected Citrix to be able to defend its position against attempts by VMware to impinge on its primary market – client enablement – and it seems to be doing so.
4. However its recent robust financial health stems from its on-line services, not from client virtualization.
5. In the main, desktop virtualization still includes a fair amount of D-I-Y, requiring the integration of several products.

That final point is why I was surprised with what I saw when I was briefed recently by Virtual Bridges.

Virtual Bridges

Virtual Bridges is an Austin start-up with a desktop virtualization product that is an all-in-one package – not a broker that connects to some other virtualization capability (such as VMware’s VDI) or a VDI capability that needs a broker. It’s a full solution.

Technically there are just two parts: VERDE and SMART.

• VERDE, Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment, is the virtual desktop management software that creates new instances of desktops (from a standard image or images) and deploys them on the server.
• SMART, which stands for Self Managing Auto Replicating Technology, provides local instantiation of the virtual desktop, creating a local cache of the virtual desktop’s state and thus enabling the desktop to run in disconnected mode, for example on a laptop. SMART itself runs on the server but installs a hypervisor on the client.

So what do these two components deliver? Well, of course they’ll deliver a Windows PC (2000 or XP or Windows 7 when available) with either local storage (on the client device) or server side storage as desired. The PC is delivered as an image and, if disconnected, it will synchronize with its master image when reconnected so it remains in step with its master image.

The VERDE/SMART combination can work on any client, including an employee’s own PC and it will even work on a Netbook, because it has a low resource overhead. It can work in VDI mode where the server image is full mirror of the PC session, so if the PC fails, the session can be pulled down onto another device.

Virtual Bridges already has some large customers, including McDonalds and Radio Shack and it also has some large deployments including a Netherlands School District where 5000 desktops are deployed. 5000 is a large enough number to demonstrate scalability of client population.

The Defining Points

This is all reasonably impressive, but on it’s own it wouldn’t warrant me thinking of Virtual Bridges as a potential Citrix competitor. There are several other details that convince me of this possibility. They are as follows:

1. The Price Per User. Because of the way its technology works Virtual Bridges can sell at a very low price point – it claims to cost about a fifth of any other equivalent solutions, including those from Citrix and VMware. That’s a huge cost differential. The actual price per user varies according to the other licenses involved (particularly Windows licenses) but it is certainly low enough to make the competition groan.
2. Cloud-Based Virtual Desktops. Because of its architecture, VERDE/SMART is ideal for cloud deployment similar to the way that Desktone deploys (read this for further details), with clients on desktops and servers in the cloud.
3. The IBM Partnership. Other software companies are partnering with IBM in this area, but Virtual Bridges’ partnership with IBM appears to be very active, with IBM directly introducing Virtual Bridges to some customers.
4. The Linux Option. Virtual Bridges also partners with Canonical and can deliver Linux Desktops. Now you may be thinking that there’s not a lot of demand for those at the moment and in most cases you’d be right – but there is a demand in some specific environments, particularly in retail for retail kiosks which need to do little more than run a browser to access the Internet. There are also similar small groups of desktops in some organizations that have a similar requirement – just a browser and email, say. Virtual Bridges has a neat solution for that.

Taking these things together, I can imagine Virtual Bridges making an impact if it keeps its sales pipeline humming, and that it turn makes me suspect that Citrix may soon have a genuine competitor in desktop virtualization.