Citrix targets SMBs with Kaviza

Contact: Ben Kolada

Broadening its enterprise VDI portfolio to the SMB segment, Citrix has acquired Kaviza, a startup offering VDI-in-a-box technology to SMBs. The move follows an initial Citrix investment announced in April 2010, and brings Kaviza fully under its fold. Though Citrix already had an enterprise desktop virtualization product – XenDesktop – the company was missing an SMB mass-market offering. This acquisition fills that gap and, with the backing of Citrix’s marketing muscle, Kaviza’s technology should see quick adoption. Indeed, the vendor has already made considerable progress on its own.

Kaviza’s success is in part attributed to its kMGR virtual appliance, which runs on a grid of commodity servers and manages virtual desktops. Once Kaviza is up and running, scaling up infrastructure shouldn’t require any more effort than dropping the virtual appliance into a new physical server since the appliance configures itself automatically.

The company’s VDI-in-a-box product has attracted a diverse client listing, and we understand that the average size of its deployments was growing. A German systems and service management vendor, Matrix42, chose Kaviza’s VDI-in-a-box to integrate with its IT-Commerce offering. Parker SSD Drives, a division of Parker Hannifin, deployed VDI-in-a-box to improve production time by reducing unscheduled downtime and time required for repair work. The University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering uses the product to give its students remote access to teaching labs. And British Columbia’s Credit Counselling Society has also adopted Kaviza. We’ll have a full report on this transaction in tonight’s Daily 451.