Citrix buys RingCube in quest to dominate desktop virtualization
Citrix is continuing on its path to become the dominant force in desktop visualization with the acquisition of RingCube, which specializes in user personalization technology for virtual desktops.
Essentially, RingCube has a piece of technology that simplifies a lot of the work done in some of Citrix's existing products, which are especially necessary as Citrix wants to focus on promoting private desktop cloud-based services.
RingCube's technology speeds up virtual desktop adoption by eliminating the trade-off between user personalization and centralized IT management.
Thus, if this were implemented in Citrix XenDesktop, a virtualization solution for managing desktops and user experiences, RingCube's assets should make it easier for IT to manage individual users and reduce the cost of storage as users move over from physical to virtual desktops.
This is made more efficient mainly because RingCube's products isolate all user-specific apps and settings in personal virtual disks, at which point IT managers can accurately determine that each user’s new virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) will have migrated over and behave exactly the same as the user's previous physical desktop.
Finally, RingCube also supports enterprise-wide VDI adoption, which enables common images amongst network users (i.e. Windows OS and corporate apps) to be stored in a single time in the data center. Thus, each user has a unique personal desktop, and IT can centrally manage a single instance of Windows and each corporate application for all users.
The deal closed on Wednesday, but financial terms of the agreement were not revealed. However, everything goes into effect immediately as the RingCube product line now shipping with full support for Citrix XenDesktop 5.
Citrix is evidently on a mini shopping spree this summer. In July, the Fort Lauderdale-based company bought out Cloud.com for its Cloud Stack set of open services, heating up competition with VMware.
Related: