Acting as an evangelist was a cool new experience and I really enjoyed making deeper connections with product team in Redmond. I particularly enjoyed getting them in front of our customers for direct feedback on new product ideas at our Annual Thin Client Computing Event this year at the Boulder House.
However, my favorite part of the award was spending time at the Global MVP Summit in Redmond, creating the presentations to the Microsoft team, and, engaging in days of discussions with some of the smartest people I have ever met. To convey some of the flavor of the MVP Summit experience I put together this video from our last trip:
Luckily, I still get to spend time with most of the same people at other events such as BriForum and Citrix Synergy. I plan to use my community oriented time now to focus on Citrix Solutions and my role as a Citrix “CTP” and technology evangelist.
Thanks to Microsoft for a great two years!
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This year’s Citrix Synergy was a very interesting and successful event. From my point of view, Citrix has found their stride in representing their unique value add to the market. They took the opportunity to show some early stage technologies, such as the Citrix Receiver for iPhone, Merchandising Server and Dazzle (see my and Joe Shonk’s thought on this here). This was a pleasant surprise to see this large, well established technology company able to shift to stay ahead of emerging trends. It was pretty clear, pretty quickly, that Mark Templeton is not resting on 20 years of success and that he and his team are in touch with the emerging Web 2.0 and Could Computing spaces. I was pretty happy overall…
After arriving home though I had a follow up meeting with a key client with a highly visible Educational Citrix project. They were at Synergy and were featured speakers and panelists, and, were a semi-finalist for the 2009 Citrix Innovation Award. They were NOT happy!! But why??
As a publicly funded educational institution who had committed their entire budget and personal reputations on a full scale adoption of the End to End Citrix solution they were confused. They had invested in hosting applications with XenApp, virtual desktops with XenDesktop and invested in virtualizing all of their servers with XenServer. Why was Citrix now featuring rich clients, client side virtualization and highly personalized PC’s used for business purposes?!!?!?
Hmmm, good question…….
I tried to explain that contrary to the appearance of it, that Citrix was not turning their back on their past and existing products/approaches, that everything they had invested in is still the best way to build an infrastructure and deliver applications. However, they made a strong series of arguments that it appeared Citrix was now suddenly touting rich clients and unmanaged PC’s and Mac as the delivery method of the future. They needed to know- did they make a big mistake deploying their system?
So, I turned to the source and contacted Mark Templeton directly. He responded quickly and personally to provide an explanation. Mark clarified that the direction is really about being endpoint agnostic. Emerging rich client scenarios, such as BYOPC (bring your own PC) are NOT being pursued at the expense of the thin client paradigm. The idea is to transcend the dichotomy and choice between thin and fat clients completely. In the DirectTV analogy that was used at Synergy , any content (application) is broadcast and can be used by any desktop (receiver)- the system should ‘automagically’ adjust to the device you are on. In the past there were limits to what a thin client could do, and, certain kinds of PC scenarios couldn’t benefit from hosted/centralized solutions. What Mark explained is that in the future all client platforms can subscribe equally to applications and the user can have whatever type of endpoint system they want.
So, the new focus on rich desktops and highly personalized personal/business endpoints should not be taken as a shift away from the proven benefits of centralized, virtualized and remote “thin” computing. Virtualized apps, desktops and servers are easier to manage and save money , they will continue to be the back-end infrastructure of this new rich client world.
So which is it Citrix, thin or fat? I think the answer is that it won’t matter going forward, centralized/virtualized content will be tailored and delivered to endpoints based on their capabilities. Personal content can remain local under your control and whatever needs to be secure and separated (i.e.confidential business data) can co-exist in a separate execution space. The cool thing is that your device could be a thin client, a PC, a Mac, a Netbook, a remote virtual machine or some other device we haven’t seen just yet (think of iTunes for applications).
Okay, so it not Fat or Thin, but potentially our client in the near future will be PHAT!
There it was….We pulled up to our house and saw a white plastic bag on the driveway, after a moment we realized it was a new set of phone books. My wife and I looked at each other, we hated to do it, but we picked it up and put it directly into the recycle bin. That is how much the world has changed- we wouldn’t even think of using a phone book, it sort of feels like trying to drive to the city in a Model T Ford. When you need a phone number, or just about any information now, you simply go to the Web.
Lightning is the new fast. The world isn’t just faster, it’s getting faster all the time at a faster pace. I needed an extra XP test machine for a project I am working on and pulled out the old Alienware machine in the corner. I hooked it up to a CRT we haven’t used in a long time. Not long ago it was a dream machine, fast, sleek, spacious. But it was really annoying to only have 1GB of RAM and nearly full 72GB disks. The CRT was the real shocker, no matter how high I set the rate or messed with the resolution, the flicker was really annoying and it occured to me that I could never work like this, although I did for 20 years. That is how much things have changed, that is how far we have come.
The project I needed the test machine is for a client with a brand new system of hosted virtual desktops. My regular desktop is a powerful iMac running Mac OSX and Windows in a Virtual Machine along with XenApp and other sessions to various virtual machines. Darn it, the new remote virtual machine running at my customer site was way faster than my local system!!
The future has arrived and I love it. It just amazes me how fast it has come upon us. We are only one step away from the reality that computing will come from the cloud and it will be faster and better than anything we have ever known. Hold on, get ready, re-tool and re-think because things are getting faster and faster, faster and faster all the time!!
BTW- did I take that picture of the phonebooks in the driveway? Of course not, it came from Google images, really a lot less work to search and quickly download than going to get the camera, take the picture and upload it to my computer!
Like water all over the Earth, computing is evaporating into the clouds and a mighty rain is about to fall….Do you agree??
I have been using Citrix products for a very long time. For years I have run my day to day applications as hosted desktops and/or published applications. As corporate types like to say “eating your own dog food”- never quite understood how that phrase came about, but that ’s another topic for another blog….
Recently I made a (test) switch to local PC and Mac desktop execution for daily work. Of course I can’t just work on one machine, so I synced my data over to a Mac OSX laptop with XP and Windows 7 running as virtual machines. I worked with both FUSION and PARALLELS, but that too is a topic for another blog. From wherever I work, I remotely access my lab which is running it’s virtual machines on Xenserver and Parallels Virtuozzo.
I did that as I wanted to give Windows 7 a real world workout and I was travelling a lot and in the process of switching laptops- perfect time for an experiment.
To make a long story short I prefer my apps hosted. While I totally ‘get’ the desire for people to have their own customized environment, I find local execution to be sluggish and it feels a bit annoying to me to wait for the cute little local un-striped hard drive. Running hosted by nature means running on high power machines with fast I/O, fast network connections to your data and a generally more responsive experience. Customers we have recently moved to XenDesktop say the the same thing- their hosted desktop outperforms even their newest desktop machines. I realize that most people will be surprised by this and it certianly wouldn’t apply to high graphics uses such as gaming, but for what I do most of the time I prefer Server Based Computing.
You know when your Dad tells the same joke over and over again and you wince. Well one of those ends with the punchline, “Why drive in a $25,000 car when you can drive in a one million dollar bus?!?”.
In this case, I have to agree with Dad- give me the big fast honking server anytime, I want to see my apps fun as fast as possible, be resilient to failures, instantly rebuildable and know that my data is safe and secure. For day to day use, I am going back to XenAPP and probably Windows 7 hosted on XenServer/XenDesktop displayed on my iMac.
Today was the keynote kickoff for Citrix Synergy in Las Vegas. First was the presentation by Garr Reynolds, a fascinating speaker who is versed in Zen philosophy and Japanese culture and the author/creator of Presentation Zen. Garr provided a great perspective on applying the Zen concepts of Beginners Mind, Openness and Nakedness to technology and business- I highly recommend you watch the link.
Throughout this presentation, and the keynotes that followed by John Gantz of IDC and Mark Templeton CEO of Citrix , myself and several colleagues were all actively commenting and reporting on the events via Twitter, my feed is showing to right on this page. Old enough to have grown up with computers but on the old side for social media, I do use Facebook to keep in touch with friends and family and Twitter to microblog to my tech/business community niche, but not quite like a teenager or 20 something does…
It was a fascinating experience. I am usually the one in the room who closes the laptop, focuses on the speaker and fully engages, you know, old school where you actually pay attention to what is going on. Instead I became absorbed in the multi-stream process of listening, reading and posting. In the process I experienced and learned a few interesting things. First I found that I did miss some points and content because of the extreme multi-tasking. This was at first kind of disturbing like how you feel when you get frustrated because you are tired and can’t focus. However, other peoples reports of details, nuances and points that I missed added a different kind of richness and detail. I lost the laser like focus I am used to but gained info and viewpoints (in real time) that I normally do not have access to while in just my own head. Instead of singular focus, it is like being immersed streams of data. You don’t learn bit by bit but through a kind of overload coming in from multiple inputs of information, some live, some texted, some from you, some from others.
While I am not going to change my work habits by spending my days tweeting, I do think that Twitter provides a different mode of learning and communication that is valuable. Think of it as a another “tool in your belt”. I am going to experiment with it some more and find the situations were it works best, would like to hear from you and your thoughts/experiences on the subject.
Citrix Systems Inc. began on April 17th, 1989. When they released their first product “Winview” I was one of the early adopters. I worked as an IT Pro in a progressive company that used NeXTSTEP on the desktop, Novell Netware as the network and key line of business applications in DOS. I tried every technology available to create a single, integrated desktop for the users across these platforms. This included early remoting and virtual machine technologies such as QuarterDeck DESQview/X and Insignia Solutions SoftPC. I was then was given a lead on small Florida based company which had the ability to actually host multiple users on one piece of hardware and display those applications on a remote computer. Although it was done over serial connections at the time (TCP/IP was a major upgrade later!) it worked and almost 15 years ago we were able to do what we take for granted today.
Needless to say, the rest is history. My love affair with the technology began and has persisted through every generation up to todays’ Citrix. In 1997 I founded Thin Client Computing and have had a very enjoyable and successful career ever since designing, implementing, optimizing, stretching and finding new and interesting ways to apply these great technologies. Happy Anniversary Citrix- below is my video tribute, as requested, for a great 20 years !!
The funny thing is that I am writing this on a Mac OSX machine (i.e. NeXTStep) with an ICA connection to XenAPP (i.e. Winview) and running a Windows Virtual Machine on my desktop. The more things change, the more they stay the same!
In upcoming episodes we will talk about some of the newest technologies- Dynamic Provisioning, VDI, XEN and Netscaler- stay tuned….
