NComputing Taps Former Citrix Exec As New CEO

NComputing has been making noise in the desktop virtualization market, and now it has a new leader. Raj Dhingra, former general manager and group vice president of Citrix Systems' desktop virtualization business, took over as CEO of NComputing last week.

A 20-year IT industry veteran, Dhingra has held executive leadership positions at McAfee, 3Com, SonicWALL and startups such as IntruVert Networks (acquired by McAfee) and PortAuthority Technologies (acquired by Websense). Dhingra joined Citrix in 2008 and left in January of this year after the company shook up management of its XenDesktop group.

Dhingra sees NComputing's market opportunity as fundamentally different than the one Citrix, VMware and Microsoft are shooting for, in which virtualization offerings allow companies to replace physical PCs with virtual ones. NComputing focuses instead on providing simple, affordable virtual desktops to markets that can't afford full VDI deployments, Dhingra said in an interview.

NComputing last month launched Office in a Box, a desktop virtualization bundle that includes software, licenses, hardware and peripherals that small and midmarket companies can use to deploy virtual desktops.

Office In a Box, along with NComputing's vSpace desktop virtualization software, is helping the company move beyond its roots in the education and SMB markets and into the enterprise, according to Dhingra. "We're starting to see adoption in retail and manufacturing, and some healthcare, like midsize hospitals," he said.

NComputing can point to several large desktop virtualization deployments as evidence of the progress it's making on this front. The company has a 150,000-seat deployment in Macedonia, three customers have deployed more than 50,000 seats, and nine have done 10,000-seat deployments, Dhingra said.

"In the past year, we've started to get partners ready to go after enterprise use cases," Dhingra said. "We're also seeing customers deploying several hundred virtual desktops from NComputing that are deployed and managed by partners."

Meanwhile, NComputing said Wednesday that Stephen Dukker, who has held the CEO title since the company’s founding in 2006, will stay on as co-chairman along with former Microsoft executive Will Poole.