XenDesktop 4 licensing whats the commotion all about?
Everywhere in the blogosphere you read articles about the license change Citrix wants to make. With XenDesktop 4 Citrix wants to go from a CCU licensing model to a named user model. The user-based licensing in XenDesktop 4 means that customers pick the users they want to deliver virtual desktops or apps to. In addition, it offers the ability to reassign a license from one user to another. For example, in a scenario where an employee quits an organization – the license can be reassigned to another employee.
But everyone is screaming thats Citrix will kill themselves with this change and that it will cost customers and so on and so on.
I think it’s the right way to go because the hype around VDI is slowly moving in the right direction.
The question I always ask myself is, “Why give everybody in a company a VDI desktop?” The majority of users will use between the 1 and 5 apps frequently. And most of the time they use apps that are not that CPU or Memory extensive. That justifies why they don’t need a powerful VDI desktop. And for the user experience, I think the user experience at the moment for XA and RDS is really good when you compare it to a few years ago. So for this type of users XA or RDS with a thin client is in my opinion still the best and cheapest solution.
But when you think about power users, like a CAD/CAM environments, SaaS, DaaS and Cloud environments it will be a licensing model that’s completely feasible. It only will be easier to make a cost calculation on a per VDI base. So outsourcing is one of the areas that’s going to pick the profit of a named user licensing model. And thats the way we go in the next 5 years. More and more company’s will outsource their applications, desktops, telephony and IT to an outsourcing partner.
I don’t understand all the commotion and also I think it’s the right way to go. So please Citrix go one.
