Why LWL over Immidio?
So, whilst I agree with the thrust of the article, I think you're semi-informed on some of the developments at Virtzilla in recent months and that may have skewed some of your views.
VMware acquired Immidio to solve the problem that their Profile Management solution (formerly RTO) was a heap of shit- and was gifting money to trickle-down players like AppSense and frustrating their VDI deals. Immidio had just closed a deal with a very large financial services firm for a very large deployment- and have proven scalability and ease of management chops.
LWL on the other hand have third rate tech they acquired from someone else, and have put a web interface on it- the entire thing is written in KixxScript. So it 1) does not scale, 2) is difficult to manage and 3) It is flaky (I can give you some former customers if you want to talk to them about it). It is why LWL, despite a cash injection of $11 million last year, approached their largest competitor to see if they wanted to license any tech- they were low on money, and had bet the farm on being acquired by VMW- totally deluded rubbish, hoping to pull another RTO on VMW.
Having said that, LWL do have an ace in the hole, and it's not their woeful FlexApp technology- so useful they've had to give it away with ProfileUnity. Flex-IO is a very good solution for it's price point- and quite a threat to more expensive players in the same space but LWL lack the capital, marketing and sales expertise to execute on it.
If Citrix were to acquire LWL, I doubt they'd internally have the capability to make it worthwhile. Citrix don't have a great track record in recent years around integrating acquisitions and knowing the technology on offer as well as the senior team at Citrix in both the technology and management arms- I think it would die on the vine. The same is true at VMW if they were to acquire them for Flex-IO.
Citrix are not going to acquire themselves out of this funk- they need to hire themselves out of this funk by getting rid of the morons in the ivory towers who have a message that does not resonant at a strategic level with Enterprises. The comment I heard from a CTO at a FinServe customer on why VMW over Citrix was also surprising- they felt Citrix were not responsive to Enterprise requires on their roadmap and instead too focused on Service Providers. I think there is a huge amount of truth to that.
VMW did make the best acquisition- Immidio was the right price, the right functionality level at the right time with a proven portfolio. Given the only other proven solution is AppSense*, and the price point for AS would never lead to VMW recouping it's purchase price.
* RES has never delivered scale any more than LWL- to the point that I have heard that AppSense Performance Manager was used at a certain customer to stop RES from tanking their servers. Still- nicer interface than AS with a better strategic message.