Who Won The Battle Of Application Virtualization?

There is an old saying that there are three kinds of lies in the world: lies, Damned Lies, and statistics.

This statement applies to those data that can evaluate three mainstream applications, namely, Citrix, Microsoft and VMware.

Microsoft said last month that they had sold 6 million 500 thousand licenses of Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), a desktop and application virtualization binding software, which was provided to those enterprise users who participated in the Software Assurance project.

This figure is about two times the total number of desktop and application virtualization users Microsoft made 4 months ago.

Brian Madden, a virtualized technology analyst, wrote in his blog that MDOP buyers may buy this binding software to install other accessories, but others do not use Application Virtualization at all.

He said: "Microsoft said that it had sold 6 million 500 thousand MDOP licenses, which is like claiming that 40% of users are using Vista now."

By contrast, when VMware bought Install in January this year, ThinApp applications had no more than 1 million users.

However, VMware Senior Product Manager Ed Albanese did not disclose the latest number of ThinApp users.

Madden said Microsoft's Application Virtualization is indeed more popular than ThinApp, but is it 6.5:1?

This is probably exaggerated. I think it's about 4:1. "

If you think Redmond is exaggerated, let's take a look at the data released by Citrix on Xen Desktop products.

Citrix acquired XenSource in August last year.

Since then, Citrix has announced that XenApp applications already own 70 million users - about 11 times the data released by Microsoft.

Madden says the problem is that XenApp is actually the Presentation Server software launched by Citrix for a long time, which can support the already old Terminal Services devices, but also support new applications such as virtualization and streaming processing.

He said, "technically, 70 million of the users have passed the authentication and can use XenApp, but only 2 million of users actually use it."

Although the above three products have the same problem, each manufacturer has different purposes.

Citrix expects enterprise users to manage all local applications through XenApp, whether they use Terminal Services or apply streaming processing.

Microsoft hopes that enterprise users will install Application Virtualization client software to replace traditional Windows, and hopes to promote the popularization of Vista through this action.

At the same time, VMware hopes that enterprise users will adopt their Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) technology.

An enterprise can create a main mirror, and all desktop users can connect to the main mirror.

Thinstall can provide customized solutions, so that each user can download them according to specific needs.