Now that the dust is settling and the tweets are dying down about the VMware acquisition of RTO I thought that I would put a little of my perspective on how the deal affects the bigger organizations such as RES Software and AppSense. As someone who has firsthand experience of dealing with competition in the personalization space, I will try and give an honest idea of how this move affects the mentioned organizations and what’s next for them.
I use a piece of software which I love called ReGet Deluxe. Stay with me here, this is neither spam nor an advertisement. ReGet is a download manager made by a small company in Vancouver, Canada. This product does everything that I need it to do, not necessarily everything I expect from a download manager but everything that I personally want it to do and because of that and the fact that it’s cheap, I own and use it.
Now there are major organizations that also use download managers, Microsoft for example uses one created by Akamai and Citrix uses another. Compared to ReGet, Akamai is a giant and no doubt their technology costs significantly more. The reason for this is simple, their investment in infrastructure, R&D, development, support and everything else that goes along with their products is done at significantly greater proportions and as such costs more. Organizations like Microsoft use products from the likes of Akamai because of this infrastructure, support and other elements.
So where is this going?
When it comes to personalization today, you have two big hitters in the industry, AppSense and RES Software. Both of these organizations are multinational, have an array of products, a significant investment in business and a tremendous customer base. Regardless of the ins and outs of the software (this isn’t about software specifics), the larger corporations will always go with the likes of these vendors simply because they have requirements to use products by organizations with substantial resilience.
Another thing that’s of importance is the actual definition of personalization. In many of the blog posts and various other communications, there have been mentions of VMware now acquiring “personalization”, just like Citrix. This couldn’t be further from the facts and actually, Citrix are the first to say that they have “profile management”. Personalization and profile management are only connected by the fact that profile management is a “component” of personalization. Personalization involves more than just saving the user’s settings, it’s a combination of policy settings, user / environment automation, resource provisioning, compliance management and more. To “personalize” a machine is to make the machine personal to the user, including everything from their settings and applications to whatever the organization wants present too.
RTO Virtual Profiles (and let’s face it, that’s what our industry is actually talking about mainly) was a “profile management” solution aimed at fixing the many problems associated with things like roaming profiles, and in honesty, was / is a very good solution. Kevin is an exceptionally smart guy and did a great job of creating a product that was small, simple and did a specific job – offer an alternative to roaming profiles. What RTO Virtual Profiles wasn’t, was a complete User Environment Management product which managed true “personalization” – that is provided by the big guys, namely RES Software and AppSense.
In the industry there are customers that want a single simple solution to a single problem, there always was and there always will be. However on the flip side there will always be those organizations that need more complete solutions. Brian Madden wrote a very good piece on his blog but said that the acquisition of RTO by VMware will mean that sales are harder for the likes of RES Software and AppSense and I personally disagree with this, simply because it’s a totally different customer base focus.
VMware now have a tick in the box of “profile management”, just in the same way that Citrix did a while back with the acquisition of Sepago. These vendors absolutely have to have this functionality because “some” of their customers demand it. Remember that these vendors have the full range of customers, major corporations to small law firms and have to cater for the full mix whereas the likes of AppSense and RES Software have a singular focus – the larger and diverse corporations.
What will be interesting is what VMware do with this software now. The FAQ document seemed to suggest that this would become a component of VMware View and nothing more (I could be wrong) and if this is the case, it would be a shame. RTO Virtual Profiles was / is an excellent piece of technology and it would be disappointing to see it disappear. What I suspect will happen however is that this acquisition will be used as a card in the attempt to “dominate” all and everyone with the “you don’t need AppSense or RES Software any more” statement, and this will fail miserably.
Citrix do an awesome job of knowing where to draw the line defining the end of their own capabilities and when to bring in partners. That’s why technology vendors such as AppSense have outstanding relationships with them and customers love their solutions, because they embrace and adopt their partners. It wouldn’t be in Citrix’s interest to go to their major customer base and tell them that they now have a complete “personalization” solution because they know that that would do more harm than good.
I think you know where I’m going with this. Bottom line is that this acquisition will do nothing to affect the business of the major personalization vendors as the customer focus of RTO was different. If anything, it takes a potential product consideration off the table now in deal negotiation and makes for one less competitive document the likes of RES Software and AppSense have to produce.
This is however just my view, not an AppSense view, not an official view but one that’s built on experience from the field of personalization management.
I would of course love to hear peoples thoughts on my views here…
This post was filed in AppSense, RES Software
About Jon Wallace:
Jon is a senior executive and technology veteran having worked with some of the largest and most complex technology environments in the world. As director of emerging technologies for a leading multinational software organization Jon focuses on creating disruptive strategy and maintains an in-depth view of the industry at large.
With the experience of working from the field level to the boardroom Jon brings a unique viewpoint catering for many factors and one which is based on real world experience.
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