It was about two and a half years ago when Dell purchased Wyse. Around that time, it actively bid on Quest and eventually purchased it. TMC (News – Alert) noted the purchases were a way for Dell to get out of the personal PC market and into desktop virtualization. Beyond its line of personal PCs, it now had the Quest vWorkspace product that provided competition to Citrix and VMware products in that market.

Now, the combination of Wyse and Quest has taken shape into the Wyse sub-brand, which provides the lead for that latest release of Dell (News – Alert)'s virtualization product, Wyse vWorkstation 8.5. In one of his most recent blog posts, Brian Madden asserts that the combined release of vWorkstation and the Wyse TCX product is the first time Dell has gathered the “best of both worlds.” vWorkstation has TCX technology for protocol acceleration and for an HTML5 client, he says, and the combination of all these features places Dell into a realm which it has not tread for very long – the realm of being a hardware and software provider.

On the one hand, Dell may be creating some impressive software as a result of its semi-recent acquisitions. This is likely to continue to threaten market players such as Citrix and VMware, and normally, that would not be such a bad thing. However, Dell's place as a hardware provider also allows it to offer servers to Citrix and VMware customers on which they can host their virtual desktops. Considering the advancement of its goals regarding virtualization, it could be good for Dell to improve its software; however, advancement of software could come with a fight against other players in the market which do not currently fight against the use of Dell hardware.

Overall, Madden appears to support Dell's push in the market. He says he likes vWorkspace and finds the combination of features such as VM monitoring, thin provisioning, disk acceleration, and multiple clients that include the new HTML5-based client, among many other features, to be a good idea. It does come with the necessary risk of making enemies with companies that were either friends or neutral market players. Turning those entities into competition can mean the start for a lot of fights – that is, if Dell crosses the line. And if it does that, it could find itself alone against virtual desktop market giants without the experience necessary to survive. That, combined with the subsequent pressure for those giants' customers to step away from Dell hardware, could send Dell's market presence down in both its established and burgeoning pursuits.