New IGEL partnership key for Teradici as they move well beyond PCoIP protocol

Teradici, like IGEL, was originally a hardware company that transitioned into a software company as the market changed, and they are looking from big things from this, and other new partnerships as the company continues its focus on a multi-cloud strategy.

David Smith, Teradici’s CEO

SAN JOSE — Vancouver-based Teradici is recognized in the IT industry as the inventor and provider of the PCoIP [PC over IP] protocol. The company has moved well beyond that however, evolving from a company that was originally based in hardware to one that increasingly defines itself as brokering across multi-cloud environments. A week ago, at German-headquartered IGEL’s kickoff Disrupt event in Germany, Teradici announced a three-way partnership with software-defined endpoint management company IGEL and secure service delivery provider Tehama that provides a  highly secure workspace-as a service connected to Amazon Workspaces. The companies reaffirmed that announcement at IGEL’s Disrupt event here on Wednesday. For Teradici, the new partnership is a key part of their own evolution.

“Partnering is at the core of everything we do, and we are thrilled about our announcement with IGEL today,” said David Smith, Teradici’s CEO. “Clearly, workloads are not becoming any simpler, so we need to deliver those in a low latency and secure way, and need to be able to broker them across multi-cloud environments. We look to broker between public and private cloud in a seamless way. That’s a big part of our technology play today. The emerging relationship with IGEL is super-important for us here, as is our integrations with companies like NVIDIA.”

Ziad Lammam, VP of Product Management and Marketing at Teradici

“Since our initial startup days, as we became a provider of multi-cloud solutions, we have become much more than a protocol provider,” said Ziad Lammam, VP of Product Management and Marketing at Teradici. We do continue to enhance PCoIP every year, but particularly over the last three years, as multi-cloud and public cloud adoption became a reality, we completed our transition from hardware, to virtualization to multi-cloud, and we have transformed the company to keep up with that. We developed our Cloud Access Software to support the three public clouds, and on-prem. That has been the big shift, providing us with access to the cloud as well as an OEM for AWS.”

“We agree with the multi-cloud and hybrid cloud approach, although the bridge to the public cloud is a little longer than we anticipated,” Smith said. “We will continue to invest in enabling new capabilities across our endpoint business as these workloads are moved to a multi-cloud environment. We are looking to power the MSP community.”

The new partnership with IGEL and Tehama extends Teradici’s partnering strategy in a new direction.

“This is a kind of unique form of new thin client offering that incorporates our software,” Lammam said. “It’s a new type of endpoint because it uses our new Linux client platform, and comes with the ability to connect to any of the cloud environments, not just standard VDI partners that are a mix of endpoint providers on thin and zero clients. It lets us connect with MSPs that provide a service. AWS is the biggest example of that, and you will see many more to come around our Cloud Access Software.”

“Our Cloud Access Software enables enterprises to easily deliver Windows and Linux desktops and applications from any cloud or data centre,” said Arjen van der Meulen, Teradici’s Director of Product Management. “It is very flexible, can live in the public cloud, and lets us partner with Amazon, Microsoft and Google. IGEL is the first partner to adopt the Teradici Linux software client on their platform.”

Van der Meulen said that IGEL is expected to productize the product around the middle of March, and will kick in automatically then once the IGEL OS is installed on a device.

Lammam highlighted the role of Teradici’s Cloud Access Manager, a control plane that is used to provide orchestration and management, in driving new business.

“We have expanded it to a full control plane and a cloud-native service,” he said. “Our strategy is really to build our feature set on six verticals: media and entertainment; manufacturing; federal government, finance, higher education and health care. Those will drive a lot of the roadmap. We see this year as a real  mix of on-prem data centre deployments and the public clouds, which the community has come to accept, and we will continue to give full support for all of them. Something like AWS Outposts, the new on-prem DaaS stack they announced several months ago at Re:Invent, will have a major impact, and we feel we are well positioned for that.”

Teradici’s channel continues to be an important route to market for them.

“We began to build our reseller network around 2011 to support our hardware accelerator product,  which was a perfect fit for VMware Horizon View,” said Alissa Poon, Director of Marketing at Teradici. “Then we expanded into remote workstations. Then in the last year and a half, we began to work with partners around multi- cloud solutions.”

Globally, Teradici has about 500 partners today, who Poon noted had been acquired more organically than via widespread recruitment.

“We are always looking for partners who can work with our product offering,” Poon said.