The Citrix acquisition of Zenprise last week will go down as one of the coolest acquisitions in its history. Simply put, how often does a company acquire another and the only thing that needs to change in the product names is a single letter! Citrix can easily rename the three Zenprise flagship products as follows:
- XenPrise Mobile Manager
- Citrix XenCloud
- Citrix XenSuite
Considering Citrix has been standardizing on Xen in most of its product names, the marketing department should be thrilled with this acquisition.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 12/10/20121 comments
The quick answer is YES! They are most definitely changing, expanding, getting more involved and complex. For the longest time the IT department in organizations was a feared entity. When I say "feared," I am using the term loosely here to imply that because the rest of the company did not understand what we did, because what we did seemed complex and "very smart" to most of them, they avoided us.
I would venture to say we came across as intimidating and as a result they avoided us on many levels -- even at the highest executive levels. They knew that there is a need for IT. A CIO might be able to communicate and bridge the gap, but IT was always viewed as a cost center, an area of the business that always spent money. But the business never understood or quantified what its return on this investment was. This led to IT organization outsourcing and a whole slew of things -- CXOs would look at the balance sheets and see this big spend in IT.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 12/05/20125 comments
Welcome to Windows 8 Land! I have been coming across many customers who are starting to play with Windows 8 RT and trying to connect it to their Citrix infrastructures -- with little luck. The reason? Evolution! Most organizations are still using Citrix infrastructure components that are not compatible with Windows 8 RT.
If you are using Web Interface or Citrix Secure Gateway or both, together, then there lies your problems. These two components must be upgraded before a Windows 8 RT client will be able to remotely connect.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 12/03/20122 comments
For a while now I have been complaining that Cisco needs to do something to reinvent itself and that it is lagging behind many other companies in our IT industry which are all try to carve their own space in the new IT. So, just like that, as if someone at Cisco wants to tell me, “Oh yeah, Eli? Well here you go!” Cisco makes two acquisitions -- Cloupia and Meraki -- and frankly I am not sure which one to be excited about more. I will say that they are both fantastic pickups and will go a long way in the Cisco reinvention process. Cisco is not done yet, however. This analyst believes that Cisco will inevitably acquire a storage company in 2013 and I am betting it will be NetApp but we will discuss this a bit closer to the end of the year as we make the 2013 predictions that y'all love so much.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 11/26/20123 comments
Citrix has been touting and finally revealed Auto Support at Synergy Barcelona 2012 nearly a month ago and its purpose is to help Citrix administrators better troubleshoot, diagnose and quickly resolve issues in their environments. The tool goes a step further, however, and aggregates best practices that Citrix developed from working with thousands of customers. So, not only does it help in troubleshooting your environment, it will also measure it against best practice.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 11/13/20120 comments
Apparently the blog I wrote about giving the Windows Server 2012 user a rational user experience is stuck in the Most Popular articles section on the VirtualizationReview.com site, so I am guessing you folks like that article enough to search for it quite frequently
Let's sweeten the deal even more. While I tell you in that article how to give that familiar look to the new server OS, I don't explain how to restore the Start menu. The reason for that is that Microsoft has quite literally removed the components and features that would allow that UI to show up. In other words, Microsoft did not disable the Start Menu -- the developers removed it completely from the source code so there is no registry and no hack that you could use to enable it.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 11/07/20124 comments
A question that seems to be on the minds of many, today, is the question of whether to convert to Microsoft's Hyper-V or VMware's vSphere. The first thing I hear after that is a price comparison, followed by an argument in favor of one or the other. My answer, as usual, is, "It depends." IT should not be looking at everything from a cost perspective all the time -- it's not the sole function of IT. I understand that the great recession molded us in a way where all we think about is cost savings.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 10/31/20121 comments
We're facing what is being called the biggest hurricane of our generation crippling the entire east coast of the U.S. And this usually turns up the conversation to backup and recovery issues that challenges any organization reliant on physical desktops in the event of a disaster. So, how about a few questions to start off this blog?
- Do you have a DR/BC plan?
- Does that plan account for desktops or just servers and data?
- Do you maintain a physical workspace recovery site?
- Do your plans call for rebuilding desktops?
- How long do you estimate to recover?
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 10/29/20123 comments
This is not a joke: A CRN report claims that Apple and VMware are working together on delivering the iWorks suite of productivity tools using VMware View. While it could be good news for VMware View and VMware in general, as they can ride the rails of the Apple crazy train, if this rumor is ever confirmed, it couldd be catastrophic for Apple. Brian Madden blogs about it with a bunch of bullet points, all of which I agree with. Still, I can't resist the urge to offer you my thoughts.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 10/24/20123 comments
What happens when you take the most powerful application delivery platform and converge that with the most powerful desktop virtualization platform on the market? Well Citrix seems to think that magic will happen, and I tend to agree.
Last week at Citrix Synergy Barcelona, Citrix showed off Excalibur which is supposed to finally integrate XenDesktop and XenApp into a single product with one installation that has a unified back-end infrastructure based on XenDesktop's Flexcast Management Architecture. Those of you who are emotionally attached to Independent Management Architecture, which today is the underlying architecture that runs XenApp, should probably begin to say your goodbyes.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 10/22/20127 comments
In part one, I offered a high-level overview of a suggested end-user computing strateg. Let's break down the topics, starting with the desktop strategy.
Desktop Strategy
While we may be in the post-PC era, it doesn't mean that physical desktops and laptops are going to disappear. We need to continue to fine-tune and deploy desktop management tools like Microsoft SCCM and others. On the other hand, ignoring desktop virtualization and VDI is also not acceptable anymore and continuing the rhetoric and debate about CAPEX vs. OPEX costs and the exaggerated costs of VDI is just a bunch of "malarkey" (sorry, I had to find a use for this word).
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 10/16/20127 comments
End-user computing has expanded so much and gotten even more complex, in this two-part series, we will explore the strategies that could be used in enterprises to address all the current issues: from consumerization and BYOD, to desktop virtualization and physical desktop management.
It used to be fairly simple and straightforward: End-users either got a desktop or a laptop and those who needed a bit more accessibility got a Blackberry for mobile email, and that was it. Sophisticated enterprises managed those desktops with either Microsoft SCCM, Symantec Altiris, LANdesk or similar technologies.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 10/15/20120 comments