Open, responsive and reliable: Inevidesk vs Horizon/ Omnissa
Inevidesk, at its outset, was a response to legacy players in the VDI market who we believed were overpriced, overly complex and lacking innovation. VMWare and Citrix were, and frankly outside of the cloud hyperscalers, remain the primary technologies in this space, especially for SMEs and those running private or on premises infrastructure.
Our services, which are built on open source KVM technology, avoid reliance on proprietary virtualisation tech, allowing us to forge our own path. As well as enabling us to develop the service and its functionality to specifically meet our clients’ requirements (including ease of deployment, management and rapid iterations), it means we also avoid the fallout when the big boys stumble or turn the screws.
VMWare was purchased by Broadcom in November 2023, who almost immediately announced a number of changes including the divestment of their end user computing (EUC) which included Horizon virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) services. The EUC business was subsequently purchased by KKR, a global investment firm, who now offer VDI services under the ‘Omnissa’ brand.
Last year Gartner warned of uncertainty regarding Omnissa’s roadmap and continued semi-dependence for many users on other VMware products. Concerns are currently compounded by recent large scale layoffs which in one sense should be expected as a post-sale reconstruction, but of course could easily result in the loss of critical internal expertise and a drop in service levels. The recent upheaval has also caused issues in relation to price increases and significantly lengthy waits for renewal quotations. No surprise then that many organisations are now looking for alternatives.
Dominance of a small number of vendors in any market is problematic, but especially for tech where extensive networks become over dependent and therefore vulnerable to lock-in. That is why we believe it’s important to encourage a range of competitive options and, in particular, to align and promote open source and open source adjacent technologies to prevent too much concentration of power and over exposure.
So Horizon VDI remains complex to manage and deploy, complicated in terms of pricing (a 29 page pricing document …), still dependent on other legacy VMWare products and its future development and support uncertain. We welcome organisations and channel partners who have historically run VMWare/ Horizon infrastructure to come and talk with us. Our approach is much simpler, more cost effective and we prize responsiveness, whether for quotations, queries or support. We can provide hosting, bespoke built hardware, easily scalable licensing, incremental adoption and a rapid response to development requests.
Contact us at info@inevidesk.com