I think it might take longer for spin off/sale to happen. Can we instead qualify winning/losing based on whether EUC is still identified as a growth opportunity on the VMW Q1 2014 earnings call?

I suppose this is where we sit back and wait to see who owes who a beer next year :)

Steve, As you know, I hold you in the highest regard – and in many ways our disagreements are indicative of what is wrong with big data. That is, we are both data-driven people who take in as much as we can from our vantage and then digest and extrapolate, but we are extrapolating from different samples, and so I was hoping to present things from my prevue, and my thanks to you for allowing me to do so on your blog. Here are my assertions: 1. EUC is the redheaded stepchild of VMware 2. VDI is the redheaded stepchild of the EUC group at VMware Here is my analysis: The “big news” in VMware-land is that they want to be a public cloud provider. Prosecuting on this strategy will require all hands on deck, because the VMW field is generally used to a one-trick-pony approach. I make no claims to know whether this approach will be successful or not, but I know it’s a world away from delivering end-user Windows workloads, and certainly has nothing to do with Horizon. Most telling, “VDI” hasn’t been mentioned in neither of VMware’s most recent earnings calls. In your post you mentioned blogs by Vittorio Viarengo and Chris Wolf. We can start with the latter who earlier today tweeted: “Horizon demo for Windows apps on iPad still didn't include any touch and swipe capabilities. Same poor user experience. #NotImpressed” And Vittorio, who having owned the reigns of EMM at VMware, jumped ship to Mobile Iron – a direct competitor for Horizon Mobile. The Citrix field who jumped ship to VMW did so because (I believe) VDI is reaching critical mass. Talk to any Citrix or VMware VAR about VDI and you will hear the percentage of undeployed shelfware is staggering. In many ways, hearing about reps from CTXS jumping to VMW is actually discouraging for VMW, these are one trick ponies. I just don’t see any real R&D ingenuity, or a push to get EUC better. I would have been more impressed by VMware hiring away an army of engineers from Citrix. I believe the hiring of a large field focus on EUC is either a Hail Mary by Pat to see if there’s any meat in this EMM pie, or lip service to keep morale high while developing a contingency. To execute, VMware needs to focus on real enterprise workloads. While they claim their three growth opportunities are the software-defined datacenter, hybrid cloud, and end-user computing – if we play “which of these three doesn’t belong”, and we look to the SlideRocket divesture as an indicator, I think that unless Horizon adoption literally explodes on some self-propelled momentum, the best play for VMware is to sell the EUC unit (or spin it off) in order to focus on enterprise cloud workloads. -Tal

1. Andre - I'm happy to put my VDI implementation experience against your own. Anytime you'd like to compare credentials and deployments, I'm your huckleberry. 2. Putting VDI desktops outside of your datacenter is an even bigger mess. If you've got those sort of capital and liquidity resources - you're better off spending them tightening up your existing desktop framework and focusing on remote apps and policy enforcement. As Stu astutely said - you could gain the same lauded benefits by simply spending the money focusing on re-architecting standard desktops. 3. Outsourcing VDI makes the assumption that you can quantify end-user experience under SLA. Such VDI deployments will entice the user to look outside of them in search of productivity which transforms your deployment into a hybrid one as the user adds their own devices to the mix for direct access to resources, the security ramification of which you can choose to ignore at your own peril.

No. The ease of hacking a virtual desktop vs. a physical desktop is not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is the assumption that either type of desktop will eventually get hacked. If we make the following assumptions: 1. Undetectable malware exists 2. It propagates through whitelisted apps Your desktop - physical or virtual - cannot prevent such an attack. It cannot detect the undetectable, and it cannot prevent it from executing because it propagated via a whitelisted application. Therefor we must assume that all desktops are vulnerable, regardless if some are more volunerable than others, the question we must ask ourselves is: Which desktop, when compromised, leaves my company most exposed?

My perspective on it is that if I have to contend with a compromised desktop. That is we start off with the assumption that regardless if the desktop is physical or virtual, it will get hacked, then I'd prefer that desktop to be outside my datacenter.

I don't care which way you cut it: While putting a desktop in the datacenter may reduce the attack surface, it does so at the cost of bringing the battle closer to the your most sensitive assets. Allow me to quote from a comment I recently made in my blog ( http://blogs.bromium.com/2012/04/04/vdiaas-is-a-pain-in-the-aas/#comment-77 ): "Think of your sensitive information in the context of treasure – your datacenter as your castle, and think of malware as barbarians rushing your castle to get at the treasure. Do you want to fight the barbarians outside the castle walls or inside the castle walls? Yes, your fortifications may be more concentrated and acute inside the castle walls, but damn.. All it takes is for one guard to make a single mistake and the barbarians are footsteps away from your treasure. Whereas outside the gates, yes – the likelihood of the villager’s compromise is greater than a knight’s but they are compromised outside the castle where the barbarian’s gain on the treasure is significantly less so than were they inside the castle walls. So the security delta between TS and VDI is insignificant to me because both solutions bring the fight within the castle walls and my premise is that even if the desktop may be less secure outside of the datacenter, it is still a smaller security risk than a desktop inside the datacenter because it only takes one person making one mistake to bring the attack too close for comfort. You will get hacked. This is not a possibility, it’s a certainty. Design your security strategy with this in mind and you will see the world through my eyes. Think less about the desktop and more about how best to make it as difficult as possible for malware to get close to your sensitive information once compromised has already happened."