Last week there were a few rumors going around about this possibility and now it’s confirmed Citrix announced the acquisition of RingCube. RingCube is the maker of vDesk a workspace virtualization solution providing virtual desktop users true isolation from the operating system. vDesk enables VDI deployments running shared desktops the ability for users to personalize and preserve their custom settings. vDesk captures these user requests for resources, files, and registry settings through management/isolation of the operating system. vDesk will handle the users’ session changes, the admin’s changes to the base VM, and will also addresses user changes that may conflict with the admin’s based on configured rules. vDesk is not profile management, vDesk enables the corporate user to maintain already learned computing experience once transitioned to virtual desktops and will ultimately assist in a successful VDI implementation.

There are more questions left to be answered over the next couple weeks during this time of merging solutions. With VMware just now adding profile management to View 5, dare I ask what becomes of “vDesk VDI Edition” support for VMware View? We can only begin to image where and how this will fit into the Citrix FlexCast model, so many unknowns around XenDesktop, XenClient, Kaviza, XenApp, and Citrix Cloud scenarios. For now Citrix already has their user Profile Management and now with RingCube have they taken a step forward towards “user installed applications”?