At the beginning of August, Burton Group, an independent subsidiary of Gartner, declared Citrix XenDesktop 4 Service Pack 1 the first enterprise-ready solution in the VDI market, according to their Server Hosted Virtual Desktop Evaluation Criteria.
But the Citrix supremacy didn’t last long: the just released VMware View 4.5 immediately received the same honor .
Specifically, View 4.5 Premier Edition earned the certification because it addressed multiple shortcomings in the previous version: the lack of role-based access control (RBAC) for administration delegation, the lack of administrative change logging capabilities to provide an audit trail for all administrative actions, the lack of support for Microsoft Windows 7 and the lack of integration with enterprise management software like Microsoft System Center Operation Manager (SCOM).
Here’s the Burton Group scorecard for View 4.5 Premier Edition:
You can compare it with the Citrix XenDesktop 4.0 SP1 one here.
It will be interesting to see if this recognition will be enough to change the mind of financial firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which see VMware as a follower and not a leader in the VDI market for the next 3-4 years.