At the end of April virtualization.info broke the news about the HP plan to stop the development of its high-performance remote desktop protocol, RGS, and its connection broker, SAM, to leave the VDI market as a software player.
The information we published is based on an internal, official and very updated HP presentation that we received from trusted sources.
Despite that, both HP and several anonymous claimed our article as false and misleading.
Because we don’t want to damage our sources, we didn’t (and will not in the future) publish that presentation. We believe that the credibility we built over the years will be enough for most of our readers.
Nonetheless, because we have no interest in discredit HP, we were happy to reach the company by phone yesterday to understand their official version of the story.
The first point is that HP fully acknowledges the existence of the internal presentation we saw and declares it a “draft strategy” that was being “tested” across the company and a few customers.
It doesn’t matter if the information contained inside it tells the opposite of what will follow, the HP leadership told virtualization.info that the presentation was far away from describing the finalized strategy.
Of course the DRAFT label didn’t appear anywhere inside the slide deck and our sources reported it as the new go-to-market strategy, otherwise virtualization.info would never publish the article in the way it went out.
The second point is that the HP finalized strategy is to continue to develop and support RGS and SAM for the future.
The company will continue to offer both its remote desktop protocol and its connection broker, side by side with the Citrix, Microsoft and VMware alternatives.
In the future HP will increase the R&D investments with these three vendors to integrate their protocols (Citrix HDX, Microsoft RDP + Calista enhancements, VMware PCoIP) with RGS and the RDP enhancements that it’s already offering through the OEM partnership with Quest/Provision Networks.
At the same time HP will work to integrate SAM with the next generation VDI technologies, like the client hypervisors that will come from vendors like Citrix and VMware, or the virtualized GPUs that will arrive from chipset vendors in the near future.
In the last few weeks HP briefed the industry analysts on this strategy and reassured virtualization.info on the destiny of RGS and SAM, so whatever has happened before the company is now fully committed to keep going its VDI software technologies.