Virtual Desktop Provider Kaviza Eyed By Citrix

Citrix Systems revealed that it intends to acquire California-based virtual desktop software maker Kaviza. The two companies have been strategic partners since April 2010, so the move was not a big surprise to industry insiders. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Kaviza’s VDI-in-a-Box, a plug-and-play virtual desktop system that has been gaining traction, enables just about anyone (not necessarily an IT specialist) to get a deployment up and running for a small or midsize business. Kaviza’s truly is an automated, turnkey way to do it; users install the software on a commodity server, and the software finds all the system nodes automatically.

Kaviza, Early  Implementer Of VDI On iPad

Citrix, the world’s second-largest VDI provider to Hewlett-Packard, needed the IT that Kaviza brought to the table because it had not previously addressed the small to medium business (SMB) space with a purpose-built VDI offering. Most of Citrix’s customers are large enterprises.

When Kaviza is running, the virtual desktop runs in its own browser-type window with all the application functionality needed. Little or no latency is apparent. Users can continue to use their local applications as normal. Read Frank Ohlhorst’s product review here.

Four-year-old Kaviza was one of the first to provide VDI support for iPads, iPhones and Android smartphones running on a data centre hypervisor – Citrix Xen or VMware ESX 4.1.

The company came out with a new remote-client version, Kaviza Remote, in April. Citrix XenDesktop provides the virtual desktop connector, and Kaviza the distribution method. With the new client-side version, automatic sync-up is available if the connectivity is cut off.

“One of the biggest differentiators for Kaviza is that we can do all this for about one-third the cost of most of the others, because we plug right into inexpensive servers, and you can use any type of existing device as the client,” Krishna Subramanian, Kaviza’s chief operating officer, told eWEEK.

Kaviza and Citrix are striving to keep all VDI deployments under $500 (£310) per seat, Kaviza CEO Kumar Goswami, who will become a Citrix vice-president when the deal closes, told eWEEK via email.

“We started Kaviza with a razor-sharp mission of eliminating the cost and complexity we saw with enterprise-class VDI approaches,” Goswami said.

“The Kaviza mission has been to make desktop virtualisation affordable, easy and practical. As desktop workloads are very different from server workloads, we saw an opportunity to offer an easy-to-use, all-in-one VDI solution at a fraction of the cost through a purpose-built grid architecture that seamlessly scales on off-the-shelf hardware.”

Kaviza was founded by virtualisation and VDI veterans from HP and IBM. The company is funded in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation.