It’s not often that a vendor introduces new features for customers of its biggest competitor, but VMware Inc. did exactly that this morning with the launch of a profile management toolkit that works with desktop virtualization software from Citrix Systems Inc. in addition to its own platform. The offering is based on technology from the acquisition of Immidio B.V. two months ago.

Prior joining up with the hypervisor maker, the Amsterdam-based startup managed to carve out an impressive niche for itself in helping large organizations manage settings and applications for users. That may sound like a straightforward enough task to accomplish even without specialized software, and it is on consumer devices, but can become tremendously complicated in large enterprise environments with upwards of thousands of employees.

Not only does each worker have different personal preferences, but providing the needed customization to address that must be balanced with compliance requirements, which requires individually vetting every file and features included in a virtual machine. And then there’s the matter of making those files and features accessible from multiple devices without introducing the risk of unintended data overwrites.

The difficulty of fulfilling all those requirements on a large scale has created a lot of business for Immidio, which boasted with over two million users under management across VMware and Citrix shops at the time of the acquisition. When a technology that holds such significance to two rivals becomes acquired by one side, it’s usually to cut off the other’s access to the functionality, but the virtualization giant has opted to take a drastically different approach that could potentially prove even more effective in luring away customers.

The capabilities of Immidio’s software will not only remain accessible to Citrix users in its newly re-packaged form as VMware User Environment Manager but also extended by a homegrown support tool introduced on the same occasion. The technology is a port of the troubleshooting solution that the company offers for its own desktop virtualization platform promising to give administrators  insight into technical problem affecting employee applications.

The reasoning behind VMware’s decision to keep Citrix customers in the loop is that organizations are more likely to buy into its platform if they’re already using key components of it, a strategy that Google Inc. is also pursuing in the public cloud with Kubernetes. The virtualization giant hopes that selling its desktop virtualization suite at a 45 percent discount over the combined price of the individual items will provide the necessary push for CIOs to make the switch.