Upwards of 90 percent of Nerdio’s new customers are flocking to it from VMware and Citrix due to market uncertainty as well as the lure of Nerdio’s low pricing and non-proprietary Azure virtual desktop offerings, said Nerdio CRO Joseph Landes.

“We’ve really benefited from the chaos that Citrix and VMware are going through now,” Landes said in an interview Sunday with CRN during The Channel Company’s XChange August 2022 conference. “So their chaos is our opportunity.”

Chicago-based Nerdio is a Microsoft Azure automation provider that aims to empower MSPs and enterprises to build successful cloud practices in Microsoft with Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365.

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Landes spent 22 years at Microsoft in various roles, including Microsoft’s worldwide artificial intelligence sales and marketing leader, before joining Nerdio in 2018.

Nerdio’s Market Momentum

Nerdio now has over 2 million users and more than 5,000 customers as market demand for Azure and its virtual desktop solution continues in the new remote and hybrid work environment.

Nerdio’s flagship Manager for Enterprise offering is a packaged Azure application that runs in users’ own tenant without compromising security and compliance by allowing third-party vendors access into the IT environment. Nerdio’s SMB offering, Manager for MSP, lets MSPs deploy, manage, and optimize virtual desktop environments in Microsoft Azure through easy multi-tenant management.

Landes said customers have been flocking to Nerdio this year, in part, due to market uncertainty from its competitors VMware and Citrix.

“Probably 90 percent of our customers are coming over from Citrix or VMware,” he said.

VMware And Citrix Being Acquired

Both VMware and Citrix compete with Nerdio in the enterprise virtual desktop market.

Broadcom sent shockwaves throughout the IT world this year when it unveiled plans to acquire virtualization and software superstar VMware for $61 billion. Many VMware channel partners and employees have expressed fear that Broadcom will cut VMware’s headcount and innovation engine as Broadcom seeks to make VMware more profitable.

Citrix, meanwhile, is set to be acquired later this year by affiliates of private equity firms Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital for approximately $16.5 billion. Once closed, the firm plans to immediately take Citrix private and merge it with Vista portfolio company TIBCO Software, a data integration and analysis software developer.

In the interview, Landes explained Nerdio’s market differentiation compared to its rivals VMware and Citrix. Edited excerpts of the conversation follow.