Congratulations to all at RTO software – Further to VMware announcing they OEM’d RTO Virtual Profiles back at VMworld 2009, Vmware has just announced that they have bought three of their products for incorporation into View. RTO goes forward with Tscale, their performance management product and they will presumably continue to innovate with more products in the future.
Congratulations to VMware. You now have a profile management solution gets you base level personalization and the possibility to extend what you have bought over time.
I have been saying for quite some time that base level personalization is a must-have for all desktop virtualization vendors – it is a glaring omission if it is not present. But personalization is only a small part of user virtualization and VMware will have their work cut out if they want to deliver all aspects of the user environment at enterprise scale.
More critically though, there is a fundamental problem in a user virtualization solution that only works across a single vendor’s products – there is no such thing as a single vendor customer. Customers already have a mix of different technologies serving their users: Desktops, Laptops, server based computing, application virtualization and an increasing proportion of hosted virtual desktops. In the future they will have client virtualization and other technologies, maybe layering, maybe images on a stick. Unless all the technologies come from the single vendor, VMware in this case, then customers will have to manage the user environment in different ways for each technology – an expensive and wasteful approach.
User virtualization solutions must deliver across all platforms in the business.
Martin Ingram
AppSense 
I’d agree with that.
VMWare have a solution that will work across their hosted desktops, their ACE environment and, when its released, their client side hypervisor. So technically, they could argue that Persona Management covers the range of devices you speak of.
However, “Persona Management” isn’t “user environment management”. Virtual Profiles speeds up profile load times and reduces corruption – so will be a good base offering – but it doesn’t offer the user setting management, the logon optimisation, and profile migration options available that products, like Environment Manager deliver.
Pinpoint and Discover are great solutions – especially in the small-mid size organisation environment.
I’m left feeling that VMWare might not have thought through what they should be doing with these new services tbh – naming it ‘persona management’ makes it stand apart from ‘user environment management’ which is really the key to managing successful desktop environment.
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