April 2026
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CEO Message
The Legacy VDI Tax Is Coming Due
Two significant things happened in our industry this month.
First, on April 15, Citrix ended file-based licensing entirely — a hard cutoff with no fallback. Every on-premises Citrix deployment now requires continuous cloud connectivity just to validate its license. For organizations that chose Citrix for on-premises control and independence, this isn't a routine update. It's a fundamental change to what they bought.
P&E firms are looking to balance debt and industry analysts are warning that the wrong VDI platform choice could inflate IT budgets significantly in 2026. We've observed this pattern before with Broadcom's acquisition of VMware. Platforms built on complexity eventually charge you for it. Softdrive was built differently — no layered licensing, no surprise cloud dependencies, no renewal shocks.
Second, HP Anyware (Teradici), our favorite remote desktop competitor and one of the most respected platforms in the market, is being wound down. We've seen this before. A large enterprise acquires a product that doesn't quite fit, and instead of evolving it or selling the assets, chooses to shut it down entirely. For the teams and customers built around Teradici, it's the end of a platform many relied on. Luckily for Softdrive, some of that talent is already moving. Softdrive has hired several senior engineers from the Teradici team, and they're already contributing to new features that will be announced soon. With these new hires and features, we're committed to providing the best experience possible through continuous improvement.
And this week at NAB Show in Las Vegas, we were proud to be part of a much bigger story. Softdrive and Oracle expanded collaboration on OCI, establishing Softdrive as a fully supported platform for delivering high-performance cloud VDI at scale.
For some of our larger organizations, if you're re-evaluating your VDI strategy, this is the moment. We'd welcome the conversation.
Product and Platform
Group-Based Access Management with SCIM
Many enterprise customers already use SCIM to synchronize users into Softdrive as part of their standard identity and access workflow. That integration has already helped reduce manual user provisioning and make it easier to keep environments aligned with enterprise directory systems.
We are now extending that same model to include group synchronization.
This is an important step forward for customers that manage access primarily through groups rather than individual users. In many enterprise environments, groups are the operational foundation for assigning resources, controlling access, and keeping onboarding and offboarding processes consistent. By bringing synchronized groups into Softdrive, administrators can work more naturally within the identity model they already use across the rest of their organization.
With group synchronization, VDI administrators can assign groups to fleets or pools instead of managing users one by one. That creates a simpler and more scalable way to manage access, especially as environments grow and user changes become more frequent. Rather than updating assignments manually for each individual, administrators can manage membership at the group level and allow those changes to flow into Softdrive more efficiently.
The practical benefits are significant. Group-based access management reduces administrative overhead, helps standardize how resources are assigned, and makes it easier to keep users aligned to the right environments over time. It also supports cleaner lifecycle management by simplifying how teams handle onboarding, role changes, and offboarding.
For customers operating larger VDI environments, this capability helps Softdrive fit more naturally into established enterprise identity workflows. It is a meaningful improvement for administrators who want a more efficient way to manage resources while reducing repetitive manual work inside Softnet.
Real-Time System Metrics and Improved Observability in Softnet
As VDI environments grow, administrators need better visibility into what is happening across their systems in real time. Basic status indicators are no longer enough when teams are responsible for monitoring performance, diagnosing user-impacting issues, and managing resources across a larger fleet of virtual desktops.
To help address that need, we are expanding observability in Softnet with real-time system metrics built directly into the Softnet UI.
This work is focused on exposing the metrics that matter most for day-to-day administration at the computer level, including CPU usage, memory usage, network activity, and storage usage. These are the signals administrators rely on when they need to understand how a system is performing, identify abnormal behavior, or determine whether a reported issue is tied to compute, memory, disk, or network conditions.
By surfacing these metrics directly in Softnet, administrators can get faster visibility into system health without relying on manual investigation or jumping between multiple tools. That makes it easier to troubleshoot more efficiently, monitor environments more proactively, and understand resource behavior in a more immediate and practical way.
Over time, this observability model is also expected to extend more broadly across the platform, including host-level visibility, helping make Softnet a stronger operational console for managing production VDI environments.
Customer Success and Enablement
Run Claude CoWork 24/7 in a Softdrive Virtual Computer
Claude CoWork is powerful on its own, but its value increases significantly when it has a dedicated place to work. Running Claude CoWork inside a Softdrive virtual computer creates an always-on AI workspace that can stay active around the clock, access approved tools and systems, and continue operating without disrupting a user's local machine.
That matters because many organizations are now looking beyond chat-based AI and asking a more practical question: how do we give AI a persistent environment where it can do useful work?
A Softdrive virtual computer provides that environment. Instead of sharing space with a user's day-to-day desktop, Claude CoWork can run in its own persistent Windows session, allowing teams to separate user activity from AI activity while supporting continuity, mobile access, and ongoing task execution. In the customer conversation behind this use case, that separation was a major reason VDI made sense: the AI could remain available, continue working when the user stepped away, and avoid interrupting active work on the local computer.
Why run Claude CoWork in Softdrive?
- A dedicated AI workspace
Claude CoWork runs in its own Softdrive computer rather than competing for control of a user's main device. - 24/7 availability
Because the Softdrive computer remains available, Claude CoWork can continue supporting tasks even when the user is offline. - Better operational separation
Organizations can separate AI execution from everyday user activity, creating a cleaner model for oversight and reducing disruption. - Practical support for real workflows
This model is especially useful for recurring, document-heavy, and coordination-heavy work that benefits from continuity over time.
What can this look like in practice?
Claude CoWork inside a Softdrive virtual computer can function less like a chatbot and more like an operational assistant. It can help organize documents, prepare meeting materials, summarize information, support recurring tasks, and stay engaged across multi-step workflows that require persistence and context.
This was one of the clearest themes from the customer discussion that shaped this concept. The value was not simply in having AI available. The value was in giving it a persistent environment, structured access to approved systems, and the ability to stay active as work continued to accumulate. The result is a more practical model for AI inside the enterprise: useful, continuous, and operationally separate from the end user's primary machine.
Example Use Cases by Industry
AEC
AEC teams often balance complex project delivery with a constant stream of supporting documentation. In a Softdrive virtual computer, Claude CoWork can help organize RFIs, summarize coordination meetings, prepare follow-up notes, and support recurring project administration without interrupting a designer's primary workstation. This creates a useful separation between high-performance design work and the operational work that surrounds it.
Finance
For finance teams, Claude CoWork can run inside a dedicated Softdrive computer to support meeting preparation, research organization, pipeline summaries, and recurring administrative follow-up. Rather than living in an open browser tab on a user's laptop, the agent operates in a more structured environment that supports continuity, consistency, and around-the-clock availability.
Healthcare
In healthcare and healthcare-adjacent environments, Claude CoWork can support administrative coordination, document organization, and recurring internal workflows from within a separate virtual desktop. This gives teams a practical way to explore AI productivity gains while maintaining stronger separation between user devices and AI execution.
A practical path forward
The next phase of enterprise AI is not just better prompting. It is giving AI a dedicated place to operate. Running Claude CoWork inside Softdrive gives organizations a practical way to support that model with a persistent virtual computer that is always available, operationally separate, and ready to help teams turn AI into useful work.
Tip of the Month: When Something Feels Off, Start with Logs
Connection issues, session freezes, unexpected disconnects — when something isn't behaving the way it should, the fastest path to a fix is getting the right logs to our support team quickly.
Softdrive captures diagnostic data in three places: your local client, the Softdrive VM, and the launcher that starts your session. Each one tells a different part of the story — a problem that looks like a server issue is sometimes a local firewall or endpoint conflict, and vice versa. Collecting all three takes less than five minutes and eliminates the back-and-forth that slows most support tickets down.
Our Knowledge Base walks you through exactly where to find each log folder, how to zip the files, and how to send them to us — with copy-paste file paths for each location.