Citrix Systems Inc chief Mark Templeton has urged IT shops to fight the ‘inertia of dead ideas’ and build on the momentum that has developed around the consumerisation of IT.
He said the PC had become a centre of gravity for enterprise computing, but most employees feel under-served when the rich user experience they enjoy at home is not being matched by the desktop service they receive at work.
“Today’s enterprise IT infrastructure is still based on the distributed computing model” he explained, noting one dead idea. The desktop has become a construct of components, each of which can be separated and changed and which are deployed as a stack, tightly coupled and locally installed. The end result is a PC lifecycle that has become overly complex and costly.
“Things are changing and changing fast.” Templeton said. “The change is being driven by the disaggregation of the PC stack through virtualisation.”
Addressing a conference hall of Citrix customers and users in Edinburgh earlier today, Templeton noted Citrix now has the technology to provision desktops with the user profile, the desktop operating system and the applications all decoupled and virtualised, and delivered either as a hosted service or streamed on demand. They can be deployed from a single instance and managed centrally, he suggested.
Citrix Xen Client provides a way of deploying secure virtual machine desktops for use by mobile workers, Xen Desktop can be used to provision streamed desktops or hosted virtual desktops for office-based, remote or guest users, while Xen App can be used for server-based provisioning of standard task-based desktops.
He likened the new enterprise IT architectures as moving towards a business model similar to that operated by satellite TV providers. IT services need to be end point agnostic, they need to be content rich and they need to be delivered with a menu of services and at a predictable cost. “We need to deploy business applications on the same basis. They need to be any-to-any, and secure when necessary.”
He argued that he had steered Citrix towards a position it now occupies, when the company has “a differentiated strategy for application delivery based around business services that can be highly tuned for total cost of ownership and agility, delivered using IT components that are highly optimised.”
The objective for IT shops has to be to minimise desktop management and the cost of corporate owned enterprise assets, to maximise use of public networks, and mimic if not replicate some of the economies and the flexibility of the big cloud service providers like Amazon, Google, YouTube and Salesforce.com.
He reckons that there is much to be learned if enterprise IT is compared against the performance and economies being achieved by the likes of Amazon, which can provision managed storage at a cost of 15 cents per GB per month. Or how a single Google administrator can manage 20,000 remote servers, how YouTube can provide network bandwidth at a cost of $10 per Mb, or a single image of Salesforce.com application that is updated each quarter can be provisioned to millions of users.
“Using Citrix tools like Citrix Receiver and Dazzle at the front and Xen Desktop, Xen Apps and Xen Server at the back we can start to deliver applications and desktops as a service,” Templeton added. Citrix Receiver is described as a universal client for the delivery of IT services and a lightweight client framework for self-provisioning and updating based on head-end controls provided through Citrix infrastructure.
Templeton insisted that offering for free some product assets like XenServer, Dazzle and Receiver is anything but a one-time publicity move.
“It is not a stunt. Free is very relevant to our customer base right now. It’s a way for us to help them extend the usability of the products they have already invested in, with some useful add-on components. But it’s also a chance for them to start to reassess their infrastructure investments, and begin to reshape how they deliver business services and move towards consumption-based licencing models. That is the way the world is moving.”
On that front, the Citrix CEO said the company was working on development of a metering product, which will take consumption and performance statistics about application and business services use and translate them into meaningful intelligence to better shape an enterprise’s understanding of resource usage. That would drive insights about application value, and support views needed on internal billing and software licensing charges.
