Nerdio CRO Sees Boost From VMware, Citrix ‘Chaos’

What is Nerdio’s market differentiation versus VMware and Citrix?

First of all, we approach desktop virtualization in a different way than those two companies.

Certainly, it’s not to take anything away from those two companies—they’ve been around for a very, very long time and doing a lot of great work, for sure. Citrix is being acquired by private equity, and VMware is being acquired by Broadcom. So those two companies are going through a lot of change.

Obviously, we’ve seen thousands of people at Citrix leaving. I mean, certainly there were layoffs, but even more people are leaving now. So there’s a lot of uncertainty.

But if you think about how we differentiate: in order to use Citrix or VMware, you have to buy into the way they do it. So they have a very proprietary way of doing desktop virtualization. You have to use their own brokering, their own control plane, their own everything.

We take a different approach.

We don’t install any proprietary elements onto a customer’s desktop. We believe that we should earn a customer’s business every day. If they don’t want to use us anymore, they could simply rip us out. And then all of their data, all of their settings, and everything else still exists in Microsoft’s Azure portal.

So as a result, we’re native Azure Virtual Desktop. [VMware and Citrix] are not native; they’re proprietary.

Can you give me an example of how VMware and Citrix are proprietary in terms of Azure?

So when VMware and Citrix say they use or that they support Azure Virtual Desktop, they’re making use of one element of Azure Virtual Desktop—which is Microsoft’s multi-session operating system.

So they do use the Windows 10 or Windows 11 multi-session operating system, but everything else that they deploy is their own technology, whereas Nerdio leverages Microsoft’s native technology and builds enterprise capability natively on top of that. That’s really our main differentiator.

Another differentiator we have is we don’t lock people into long-term agreements.

Our price for our products is $3 per monthly active user. You can buy as much as you want or as little as you want. And if you don’t like us, you could just cancel the agreement.

We sell through Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace. So everything’s done through Microsoft’s Azure Marketplace: the deployment, the billing, etc.—it’s friction free is probably the best way to put it.

So those are few ways that we differentiate from them and aren’t proprietary like them.