As well as the PCoIP Ultra protocol (more of what that actually is later), the Cloud Access SKUs include brokering and management capabilities, plus there’s a cloud management plane option.

Cloud Access is very much the core focus of Teradici’s development and feature offerings. If you closely examine the offerings, you’ll notice the recently announced “PCoIP Ultra” technology is included only in Teradici’s own Cloud Access and Cloud Access Plus offerings. Desktop Access is aimed at VMware Horizon or Amazon WorkSpaces users. So, what do Teradici currently sell? Today, software-wise there are three offerings available direct from Teradici under the Cloud Access Software family: Desktop Access, Cloud Access, and Cloud Access Plus. Additionally as Teradici’s own offerings have been targeted at the most demanding graphical uses the defaults and behavior are often out-of the-box tuned to those, so when compared on EUC cases, using EUC methods against protocols tuned for less demanding cases with different behaviors the comparisons and conclusions were often meaningless and flawed. This has often led to occasionally problematic “PCoIP” benchmarks in the EUC space, confusing whatever is included with VMware with Teradici’s own offerings. In recent years, VMware have moved to developing an in-house protocol ( Blast Extreme), and, whilst they continue to support PCoIP which is popular with their users, it feels more like an offering in maintenance rather than development.

Meanwhile, Teradici carried on working on their own standalone offerings, developing protocol enhancements that didn’t necessarily make it into the VMware offering. In 2008, VMware, lacking a performant protocol in-house, licensed Teradici PCoIP and included it for free with their products. They established themselves as one of the most sophisticated and mature vendors in this market, and naturally carved out a niche in the most demanding cutting-edge use cases where the mass protocols didn’t quite cut it, focused around their PCoIP protocol. Later, brokering and management software followed, along with client software that meant you didn’t need to use Teradici’s dedicated hardware, and could instead repurpose generic PCs and laptops. To facilitate this, they developed sophisticated protocol and compression software to work with this hardware, as well as with more generic hardware. This included server and end point cards and the like, that often were incorporated into a range of end points, including thin clients.

Teradici were traditionally a company that made hardware particularly good at processing graphics and for remote access.

Teradici pcoip endpoints