During his last earnings call the VMware CEO Paul Maritz didn’t just announce a 38% drop in profits and the hiring of several new executives, but also the company forecast for the VDI adoption.
It’s not a secret that VMware is pushing hard on VDI since April 2007, when it acquired the startup Propero and decided to compete against its former best partner Citrix and all the rest of the ecosystem that itself created in 2006.
So it’s surprising to hear Maritz saying that a serious adoption of VDI won’t happen before another one or two years.
The question was submitted by a Citi analyst during the earnings call, who asked to separate the hype from the reality. Maritz answered:
…That’s going to take a while for them to get comfortable to really understand all the issues involved and actually get into production so we view this as incredibly important with tremendous amount of potential but it’s really going to be into 2010 and 2011 I think before we start to show a significant impact in terms of large amounts of revenue…
The comment is even more surprising when we compare the results that VMware and Citrix announced in the desktop virtualization space.
Maritz said that his company secured two new Enterprise License Agreements (ELAs) in Q2 2009, while the Citrix CEO Mark Templeton reported 200 new customers for the same timeframe, and 10 of them booked over 1000 virtual desktops.
It more than clear that VDI is not ready for a mainstream adoption, but this lack of confidence from VMware is something pretty new.
Maybe this is why the company is actively looking for a new CTO that can lead the desktop virtualization strategy.