Pano Logic CEO: M&A Activity in VDI Space ‘Makes Sense’

The virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) space has made a lot of headlines lately thanks to the number of mergers and acquisitions in the space. In the last two months, Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) has acquired Wyse Technology, Citrix (NASDAQ: CTXS) bought Virtual Computer and VMware (NYSE: VMW) purchased Wanova. So what can we expect down the road? Pano Logic CEO John Kish has some ideas — which, unsurprisingly, include his company’s future — that he shared with Talkin’ Cloud in a phone interview. Excepts from that conversation are below.

The state of the current virtual desktop market:

“We were in a market phase for a while where license sales from VMware and Citrix were well ahead of the deployments they had, and the market is now catching up there. And one of the signs that its catching up there is the spate of acquisitions as you’ve seen, as these big companies start grappling with, I think, a lot of the architectural holes they have in their offerings, and they seek to sort of fill those holes through point acquisitions like Wanova, like Virtual Computer and others.”

In Kish’s eyes, the current level of VDI market and acquisitions activity is a boon for Pano Logic:

“Desktop virtualization, while I think it represents an extremely important shift in the way people have been doing computing, to date has not been the easiest thing to implement on the back end. And that’s due to the fact that there hasn’t been the emergence of any kind of standard architecture in the industry. And I think as Citrix and VMware square off again we’re starting to see those standard architectures develop, which is nothing but good news for Pano Logic because that means more and more people are actually implementing desktop virtualization. And as they do that they’re beginning to replace the PCs, which of course has really been the overall goal of VDI since its inception.”

Kish, who was CEO of Wyse Technology from 2004 to 2007, offered his perspective on its acquisition by Dell:

“I think it made tremendous amount of sense for everybody. Dell had long felt sort of a hole in their thin offerings, without having a strong ‘thin client’ offering. HP was out there selling thin clients with incredible offerings. At that level the Wyse acquisition made a lot of sense. I also think that it also made a lot of sense because Dell has been trying to figure how to become a post-PC era kind of company. And I think they sent a very loud and clear message with the Wyse acquisition that it was going to be about the next generation of endpoint and that it was going to be about the cloud.”

And of Pano Logic’s immediate goals:

“We have to build a purpose-built desktop virtualization endpoint and we’re finding tremendous market traction for this as companies jettison PC’s in favor of easier to manage systems. What we are riding on is the VDI market acceptance. The whole point of VDI is to basically build virtual PC’s, in the network or in the cloud somewhere. Once you’ve done that, the first thing you notice is that you don’t need the PC on the desktop anymore. If you leave it there, you still have the burden on managing the PC at the endpoint but now you’re also managing a PC in the network. So as people go through the process of removing PC’s from their physical architecture they look for devices to replace it with and we are, as I’ve said before, kind of the logical conclusion of the argument. There’s nothing left to take out a panel. And so it sits just as a connection between a user and their desktop which is running in the cloud.

Did the concept of “logical” factor in the naming of Pano Logic?

“It did. I wouldn’t read too much into the naming of a company. (We both laugh.) But yes, we are very interested in what it takes to completely remove the cost from the endpoint device. And if you were to think about the cheapest PC you could think of, or the cheapest thin client you could think of, you’ll find there’s still an awful amount of cost that’s involved in it. We came at it by saying, ‘If you were to logically construct the minimum endpoint, what would you have to put in it?’ And what we figured out is that you wouldn’t put very much in it. What you would need to do is invent a system that allows you to shift all the computing into the network or the cloud. And by doing that you’d be able to reduce to overall cost of computing to an end user.”

And speaking of Pano Logic and its product focus, readers can click here for an overview on its partner program.