Citrix acquires RingCube

Citrix have just announced their acquisition of RingCube, it's been an active few months for Citrix with their recent acquisition of Kaviza. RingCube's vDesk product fits in the user virtualisation/user personalisation category along with products from Unidesk and AppSense. vDesk is much more than user profile management (likewise for the Unidesk and AppSense products), to quote RingCube's website "The vDesk workspace separates the user's desktop environment, including applications, data, and settings, from the operating system"..... "When administrators need to provision new applications, update existing applications or deliver data to the users' workspace, they simply make the change in the master workspace, apply the new version of the master to the user or group, and a differential update is automatically pushed to the user at their next login."

I love the concept, especially being able to centrally update an application and have the update apply to all users while not blowing out disk storage. My question is how effective this is over the long term: changes to the master workspace must be stored in a per user workspace, which over time will continue to grow - after two years how big has an average user workspace become? Are there any means to control this organic growth? User profile management will become "user personalisation management" encompassing not only the user profile, but user installed applications and user data as well.

This is a big feather in Citrix's cap and will certainly add value to their product suite. Will we now see VMware making an acquisition to play catch up? Based on recent twitter activity is seems that Unidesk is the most like target.

Now when as a Citrix Partner will I be able to get my hands on vDesk??