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With the announcement of the inclusion of the PC over IP (PCoIP) Teradici in VMware View this week at VMworld.  I think that there is something people may be missing.

The big disadvantage of the original hardware to hardware PCoIP implementation was that each connection to the server required it’s own Teradici card.  This is obviously not a scalable solution.  As the software to software solution is unveiled at VMworld, the attention seems to be on the fact you can get the performance without stuffing your servers full of Teradici cards.  To my mind the software to software approach has a big flaw, you need power on the client. Power on the client means either a full PC on the other end, which defies the point, or a really expensive thin client.

The real key would be to go from software to hardware.  A software client on the server communicating with a hardware Teradici chip on the client.  You could avoid all the issues of managing the ‘almost PC’ modern thin clients and go back to the cheap, minimal management, devices I think thin clients should be.

I’m curious as to why this is not being made more of as the client devices are already there like this one from Samsung and if you look at the Teradici video on Brian Maddens site they say it will work.

As the devices get cheaper, maybe down to about $200 with the great performance of PCoIP I can see this being the ‘killer app’ for VMware in this space.