Recently, another foreign giant issued a statement that it will withdraw from the Chinese market. Following LinkedIn and Teradate, the protagonist this time is virtualization giant Citrix.

Citrix stated that it will stop all commercial transactions (including services) in the Chinese market (including Hong Kong and Macau) due to cost reasons. This decision will take effect on December 3. Citrix's old customers and partners will receive farewell emails from the original manufacturer.

As an iconic manufacturer of VDI, Citrix accounted for almost half of the global desktop virtualization market at its peak, and its desktop transmission protocol ICA was also unparalleled in the industry. At its peak, Citrix was even able to compete with VMware. Why did such a well-established technology manufacturer with a profound background sadly withdraw from China? How can its legacy customers find comparable alternatives?

In this story of defeat in Maicheng, we can see not only the helpless end of a technology giant in China, but also the reshaping of the pattern of China's cloud desktop market in the process of local substitution.

Abandoning the Chinese market, costs or non-root reasons

Citrix withdrew from China. The official reason given was that business costs in the Chinese market continued to rise. However, upon closer inspection, it can be found that the cost problem may only be the result of Citrix's "defeat", not the root cause.

As the saying goes, foreign monks like to chant sutras. But in China's cloud desktop market, Citrix's development does not conform to this norm. According to the "Virtual Client Computing Software Market 2021 Tracking Report" released by IDC, Citrix ranks third. As far as data is concerned, Citrix is ​​in a position of "having a place, but not dominating".

From a global perspective, Citrix's main market has never been in China. For Citrix, although the Chinese market is large, it is only its marginal market. This also determines that Citrix will not place a heavy bet on it. Moreover, user needs and preferences in the Chinese market may be quite different from those in other regions. When Citrix’s investment cannot adapt to and meet this rapidly changing demand, its technology products will inevitably become more “acclimated” in an attempt to eliminate this The result of such estrangement and struggling to maintain is that operating costs continue to rise.

In the final analysis, the mismatch between products and needs is the root cause. Coupled with the strong rise of a number of local competitors, Citrix is ​​even more unable to compete in the Chinese market. Especially in the VDI market, Huawei, New H3C, and Ruijie Networks are all good players, each with their own advantages in product innovation, market expansion, and price competition.

In addition, the acceleration of the substitution process has also squeezed Citrix's market space even more, and the decision to "abandon the Chinese market" does not seem too surprising. The question is: after Citrix leaves, how should its original users choose among the various local cloud desktop products?

The journey to find alternatives: Who will relieve the anxiety of Chinese users?

Although in the official statement of Citrix 's withdrawal from China , there is a commitment to fulfill the contractual agreement to provide maintenance and support for all customers in the region, which means that existing customers will have a certain buffer period. But in the long run, product replacement is imminent. Only by putting it on the agenda as early as possible can we be prepared.

Fortunately, with the increase in the popularity of cloud desktop products in China, the cloud desktop market is booming. In view of the large differences in business systems and usage requirements in different industries , major cloud desktop manufacturers have launched unique cloud desktop solutions, which can be said to be a hundred flowers blooming. Users have a lot of choice, but product replacement involving IT architecture is never an easy thing.

For users, the first concern may be whether the overall capabilities of the alternative solution can benchmark against the original solution. Taking Ruijie as an example, its overall cloud desktop solution architecture adopts a layered and sub-module design.

In terms of terminal architecture, it provides three technical architectures: VDI, IDV, and TCI. In addition to the traditional VDI architecture, the introduction of IDV and TCI architecture can more flexibly adapt to enterprise terminal recycling and terminal management needs, and meet high-reliability scenarios such as offline terminal availability.

As for the transmission protocol, the self-developed EST desktop connection protocol is used. The EST protocol can detect in real time through dynamic networks and adaptively adjust the bit rate output to ensure picture fluency; it uses block caching technology to remove redundant parts, reduce the amount of desktop image information transmission in a single time, and reduce the bandwidth required for transmission . More importantly, the EST protocol can be compatible with the access and use of a variety of heterogeneous desktops, achieving unified access to cross-platform and multi-vendor desktops, which solves the common compatibility and adaptation problem of "dual-track operation" in the process of replacing old and new ones.

In the back-end design, "hyper-converged architecture + distributed storage" is adopted. The hyper-converged architecture has significant advantages in reliability and scalability. When the management node fails, the container will be pulled up on other healthy nodes and access the same database content. At the same time, multi-copy storage technology can help users achieve a better balance between data security and cost. It is particularly worth mentioning that in terms of data storage, Ruijie supports snapshots , which can quickly restore the virtual machine environment , and can also be connected to third-party NAS storage to achieve redundant backup of desktop data . This is something Citrix's product itself does not have.

It can be seen that local cloud desktop vendors like Ruijie not only have the overall ability to undertake the replacement of Citrix products, but also demonstrate their pursuit of detailed innovation in the overall architecture design of the solution based on the personalized demands of Chinese enterprise users. .

Break through three levels: gain cloud desktop solutions that are more suitable for Chinese enterprises

In recent years, there has been an obvious trend of localization. In the context of buzzwords, pancake fruit has become a Mexican chicken wrap that is more suitable for Chinese babies; sauce latte has become a morning C and night A that is more suitable for Chinese babies. Returning to the essence, products, services and even brands that are more suitable for Chinese people's concepts, habits, culture and aesthetics are more favored by the market.

The same is true in the ICT field. When many companies seek local technology products and services, they not only pursue whether they can be used, but also consider whether they are easy to use.

Focusing on the cloud desktop market, we can find that the focus of industry competition is no longer dominated by technology, but more determined by industry capabilities. For users, manufacturers must understand technology, but they must also understand the industry. The ability to solve enterprise pain points in specific scenarios is the core point of the choice.

So how to create a cloud desktop product that is more suitable for Chinese enterprises? Three hurdles must be passed.

The first level: whether the scenario-based requirements can meet expectations.

If you look at cloud desktop products from the perspective of scenarios, from ordinary office to remote office, from general branch scenarios to design, R&D, production lines, etc., you will find that the current service logic of cloud desktop is gradually subdivided.

Take ordinary office scenarios as an example. Originally, most employees might only need light office applications such as Office. Now, design software, video editing software and even programming software have begun to enter the essential tool kit for employees. How to make this kind of scene with heavy office requirements a smoother experience? Ruijie and AMD jointly launched a cost-effective GPU cloud server built on AMD GPUs, making GPUs a standard feature on office VDI desktops. Compared with traditional cloud desktop solutions equipped with Nvidia GPUs, Ruijie's pioneering AMD "GPU cloud desktop solution " not only eliminates the cost burden of GPU licensing, but also significantly reduces users' total cost of ownership while improving performance.

The second level: how to ensure data security.

Cloud desktop involves the remote transmission and storage of user data and applications. The legality of the remote access terminal, the security of the remote access terminal itself, the security of transmitted data, and virtualization security risks are all challenges it may face.

In order to prevent data from being landed or taken away, Ruijie has built end-to-end security protection for the whole process based on the idea of ​​"who can use, how to use, and how to manage" enterprise data assets. The first step is to ensure terminal access security through multiple terminal authentication methods; the second step is to protect the security of the terminal desktop environment through multiple virtual machine/desktop protections; the third step is to encrypt and prevent data from being transmitted through the network to ensure Core assets are centralized and manageable; the fourth step is to prevent data from being taken away through peripheral copy control, screenshot prevention, light/dark watermarks and other methods.

The third level: whether management and operation is efficient.

In fact, one of the major advantages of cloud desktop is that it solves the operation and maintenance management problems encountered in traditional PC environments. How to make the advantages better and longer is also a key link for cloud desktop manufacturers to make efforts. Ruijie not only provides rich desktop operation and maintenance management analysis interfaces and operation and maintenance reports for administrators to use, but also provides rich and flexible deployment modes for daily desktop management.

Cloud desktops usually have two deployment modes: personalized desktop and restored desktop. For a long time, in order to ensure the smooth use of cloud desktop terminals, operation and maintenance personnel often set up the "desktop restore" function to ensure the purity of the system as much as possible. But for users, restoring the desktop can easily lead to the loss of personal data and requires reconfiguration every time the computer is turned on. In order to resolve the contradiction between restored desktops and personalized desktops, Ruijie decouples desktops from personal data and stores users' personalized data locally or in the cloud through "pooled desktop + UPM (user profile management)" , allowing operation and maintenance personnel to update the desktop with templates without affecting user configuration and data.

Replacement in progress: Jade and Porcelain Stone, Diamond Trial

Scenario-based, security, and operation and maintenance are the three basic dimensions to measure whether cloud desktop products are available and easy to use. Whether it can truly fill the gap left in the market after Citrix's exit and gain recognition from users still needs to be tested in practice.

Among Ruijie’s implementation cases, BOE is a typical representative. As business grew, BOE built a new factory in Qingdao. Regarding the desktop solution selection, the group conducted a half-year investigation and evaluation, and finally selected Ruijie Cloud Desktop, which is fully used in production lines, high-performance office, and GPU graphics design scenarios.

Among them, the “pool desktop + UPM” technology mentioned above has been highly recognized by BOE. The combination of pooled desktops + UPM separates user personal data from the Win operating system image, and creates the number of desktops based on the number of concurrent users. The number of desktops is greatly reduced. Users can not only obtain restored desktops randomly, but also obtain personalized data. The experience is better. According to feedback from BOE, compared with the previous brand of Chi desktop, Ruijie’s boot speed and opening of software are faster, reduced from the previous 180 seconds to 20 seconds, and the user experience is better.

The stone of jade and porcelain is tested by diamond.

Since the release of its self-developed cloud desktop platform and self-developed EST protocol in 2013, Ruijie has been working continuously in the field of cloud desktop for ten years. There are currently two major R&D bases in the country, with more than 400 R&D personnel, and more than 50,000 point cloud desktops have been delivered in the past two years. According to IDC statistics, Ruijie has led China's enterprise-level terminal VDI market for six consecutive years from 2015 to 2020.

In the fiercely competitive domestic cloud desktop market, it is no accident that Ruijie stands out. First of all, Ruijie has always been based on scenarios, transforming customer needs into product needs, and then into product design, development and demand management; secondly, after laying a stable and inclusive foundation, Ruijie will change according to the times. The inclusion of personalized demands and the pursuit of excellence in details have also become secret weapons in its development process; finally, the links related to IT infrastructure upgrades, IT architecture changes, and replacements are often not "one-shot" transactions, but require Continuous response and iteration to complete. In addition to the technical field, meticulous supporting tools, comprehensive resource support, and comprehensive service guidance are the secrets of successful replacement.

Plowing in spring and hard work in summer, harvesting in autumn and storing in winter. Citrix's exit has in disguise contributed to the reshuffle of China's cloud desktop market , and has also given domestic cloud desktop manufacturers like Ruijie an opportunity to upgrade and reach higher levels in the face of more tests and trials.