Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenApp now offer customers two different computing models for centralizing their client computing. I have had about a dozen or so customer conversations regarding where the best use of each technology is. I want to share that with everyone.

People ask me whether the IT and business problems to centralize have changed. The answer is - they have not. Costs, compliance/security and flexibility for access remain to be IT challenges that centralization can solve. If you think about the culprit that keeps the TCO of desktops high, it is application deployment and management.

The two problems that customers have been able to successfully address with XenApp are:

1. Delivering appa to users anywhere - typically customers start with virtualizing problem apps and grow their XenApp usage overtime.
2. Virtualizing the full desktop with all the apps - it has worked great for task based workers who use standardized locked down environments with few apps.

Overtime, XenApp has addressed several key challenges in addressing those requirements including scalability (via 64-bit), app compatibility (via app isolation environments any app can be made compatible with XenApp), graphics (via SpeedScreen), performance monitoring (via EdgeSight) and offline support (via portable app virtualization/streaming). This has enabled an even broader use of XenApp for virtualizing more apps within existing XenApp customer base.

Now, XenDesktop enables our customers to expand desktop virtualization to not just task workers (served via XenApp shared desktops) but also office workers (VM/Blade based dedicated desktop). However, dedicated desktops always come at a cost. The cost is reflected in the user density per server. Where as a dual core XenApp server can serve 100 shared desktops, XenDesktop can serve about 10-12 users per dual core server. So, the cost of hardware required per user goes up from $25-$50 for XenApp to about $250-$350 per user on XenDesktop. Hence, the XenApp based shared desktops will always be the most cost effective way to deliver virtual desktops.

Both models have their merits and limitations. As stated XenApp serves desktops in the most cost effective manner and is best suitable for task based workers. The limitation for XenApp is around personalization capabilities - end users cannot fully personalize their environment, which is a need for mainstream office users. XenDesktop, on the other hand, is best suited for virtual desktop delivery for mainstream office worker. The real limitation lies in offline access requirements, or advanced peripheral support.

LAST BUT NOT THE LEAST - delivering applications using XenApp radically lowers TCO of BOTH physical and virtual desktops by enabling IT to centralize the apps and never install them with the desktop. There are different benefits for physical PCs and virtual desktops.

With physical PCs, benefits of using XenApp are:

1. Increases the life of PCs
2. Enhances application and data security
3. Enables app delivery anywhere using any device
4. Lowers the cost of application management

With XenDesktop (virtual desktops), benefits of using XenApp are:

1. Dynamic provisioning of virtual desktop implies that a user's desktop always stays pristine with no apps installed - all apps are delivered (using streaming or hosting technologies) enabling an on demand assembly of personalized desktop at the time when a user logs on.
2. Predictability and Capacity planning on VDI - Separating all LOB apps that have unpredictable (problematic) resource requirements, and running them on separate XenApp servers, prevents over-provisioning the VDI server architecture and can reduce the number of servers required for virtual desktops, improving the TCO of virtual desktops.
3. Application and license management - each app can be controlled granularly. You have complete visibility into who has access to the applications and who accessed which application when.

In summary, IT now has two excellent options (XenApp and XenDesktop) for building their virtualization infrastructure to meet the needs across all their use cases:

Task workers - use thin clients with shared desktops delivered via XenApp
Mainstream office workers - use desktop appliances with dedicated desktops delivered via XenDesktop
Mobile users - use XenApp to deliver all streamed or hosted apps for both connected and offline access

At Synergy (http://www.citrix.com/synergy), this topic will be discussed at length. Come visit us!

Before an audience of more than 4,000 IT professionals and partners at Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) last week, Brad Anderson, General Manager in the Management and Services Division at Microsoft, kicked off the day with the keynote "Managing the Dynamic Desktop". As part of the keynote, Brad demonstrated Citrix XenDesktop working with Microsft Hyper-V and System Center Virtual Machine Manager to deliver a dynamic desktop to a user anywhere. XenDesktop was the only desktop virtualization product demonstrated as part of the keynote.

View the demo
Read the blog

Citrix and Microsoft are in agreement that desktops no longer need to be tied to a fixed device but can be effectively delivered as a service to any knowledge worker using any device anywhere. With XenDesktop, a user can take her active virtual desktop with her as she moves from meeting room to desk to kitchen to home office (all on different endpoints). If I am working on a word document, the app can stay open without saving when I move from endpoint to endpoint, giving users ultimate flexibility.

XenDesktop, when released shortly, will support the delivery of virtual desktops running on Hyper-V - all deployed and managed through System Center. To get more details and see live demonstrations for our final XenDesktop product, visit our annual customer event, Synergy May 20-23. http://www.citrixsynergy.com

For early customer evaluation and pilots, Citrix and will provide email and web based support for XenDesktop running on Microsoft Server 2008 Hyper-V RC and System Center Beta. We will have full support for System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2.0 30 days after its availability.

In case you dont know already, Presentation Server 4.5 is now available on myCitrix.com. Try it out!

Most of you will start purusing a long list of features in Presentation Server 4.5 and the new Platinum Edition for the product and will be trying to digest all that new stuff in the product. And, in the midst of all that, what most will likely ignore is a subtle yet most fundamental change in the product.

With Presentation Server 4.5, we have redefined the product to some extent - and you will see more of that reflected in the product overtime. Presentation Server 4.5 is no longer a multi-user remote access product as it started with old WinFrame or MetaFrame - instead it is an application delivery system for windows applications. What the difference? The difference is that Presentation Server is a superior alternative to application deployment using traditional methods. It allows you to deliver applications rather than deploy them. Application delivery can be via virtualization protocols such as ICA or streaming technologies (previously called Tarpon). Presentation Server 4.5 allows customers to stream or virtualize their delivery for windows apps. You will see Citrix add more and more integration different streaming and virtualization of application delivery the future, including based application delivery where the system can pick how to deliver application based on the usage scenarios.

Presentation Server 4.5 also introduces a new edition - Platinum Edition. While it may appear like a bundle of several free standing products to begin with; however, our vision is to further integrate those technologies into one system for windows application delivery. For example, you can envision things like configuration of single sign on to occur when you publish a virtual or streamed application, and making the experience more seamless for end users. Another example would be for EdgeSight to be able to monitor ICA responsiveness even better. Presentation Server 4.5 Platinum is very different from Citrix Access Suite where we bundled different products into a single package making it more cost effective. With Presentation Server 4.5 Platinum we are committed to delivering a solution for the line of sight between applications and users and we will build the required technologies as part of Platinum Edition that will complete that line of sight. In future releases of Platinum Edition, Citrix plans to add new technologies such as application monitoring - Project Gemini/IRIS (ICA Recording), to further enable you to build a complete windows application delivery system.

Presentation Server 4.5 has a lot of new stuff and can be used many different ways. But in the midst of all that, Citrix has changed the way we think about the product entirely and you will see more and more of that thinking reflected in the future releases. Enjoy PS 4.5 I am always looking for your feedback; post it!

Its been a long time (about a month) since I posted my previous note where I was shamefully advertising the benefits of using Presentation Server. Based on the ratings on the post (which I checked today), it doesnt seem like it went quite well. So, while I am still passionate about the topic, I will stay clear from it so that I dont bore the audience.[:S]

During the past 5 weeks, I continued to spend fair bit of time on the road or on the phone with our customers, folks like members of this community. While I dont get involved in getting hands on with the product, I do get involved in discussions with the IT management teams and how they perceive Citrix. At one of my trips, I was sitting on a dinner table with few Citrix professionals and we started talking about their IT team objectives. And, we soon discovered that there were three distinct groups sitting on the table with three distinct priorities. There was over 100 years of Citrix experience sitting around that dinner table, working at several different firms. As we discussed around the three different categories, we reached some interesting conclusions that I will share with the group.

Problem management, Risk management and Cost management the three buckets you can place all CPS users into. Let me define these.

Problem Management - this is where I would place many of users. users manage their deployments around problems. They do not plan around application delivery strategy - but they achieve it overtime through resolution of problems. In these customers, Citrix teams are often isolated and run fairly independently. They may often define CPS as a band-aid to their problems, even though they may have several places where band-aid is being applied and the business may seize to operate without the band-aid. If you are in this type of organization and you are running, managing or administering your CPS environments, then focus on MARKETING. The most effective implementations that have come out from such organizations have been from the teams who have done a great job in making their IT organizations aware of the value that CPS brings to them. You do that through highlighting differences between before and after (since the organization thinks based on problems and their solutions and forgets about them once the problem is resolved).

Cost Management - another area to place many CPS users. These organizations focus on costs and cutting down costs. You should think about increased user density, server consolidation, bandwidth management, etc. Your goal should be to cut costs down in all places including server infrastructure, database and app infrastructure, network infrastructure. You plan the role of OPERATIONS in such organizations. You should be continually monitoring key metrics within your CPS infrastructure that impact your costs and report on them to your management teams. You should be cautious in implementing new items or adopting new technologies, with all the cost metrics studied.

Risk Management - These organizations focus on managing risks and elimintating them. Unless you belong to these organizations, you wont understand what I mean. These organizations are often leaders in innovation in their businesses. And in order to sustain their leadership, they need to do things differently but manage risks in succeeding. You can pick an industry of your choice and you will find the leader most likely belonging to this category. If you are in this category then your focus should be to AUDIT. You should ensure that you are taking steps in creating an environment that is dynamic and pushing its boundaries. This includes things implemented for Presentation Server environment to make your environment more dynamic.

A big problem that exists in training classes, certification courseware, blog recommendations, reference architectures professional implementations is that a cookie cutter approach is prescribed. This in itself leads to several failed implementations of CPS. have run across some implementations of CPS that were great for cost environments but awful for an organization who is focused on risks.

So, what in it for you?

1. The skills around CPS that you acquire in one organization are not necessarily directly transferrable to another.
2. Before applying the prescribed recommendations to your environment, validate your objectives and category of users that your organization falls under.
3. If you want to talk CPS implementations in your organization in a manner that it resonates with your management team, you need to understand their priorities and follow MARKETING, OPERATIONS OR AUDITING functions based on the bucket your organization falls under.

Have you ever wondered whether the way you operate is to manage costs, problems or risks?

Since I posted my article Constellation targeted to improve end user experience through ICA enhancements in Project Ohio, I have received several questions regarding what value Presentation Server provides under different network scenarios.

There are several SpeedScreen technologies that ICA already includes including SpeedScreen Latency Reduction, SpeedScreen Browser Acceleration, SpeedScreen Image Acceleration, SpeedScreen Flash Acceleration. All these technologies are either targeted to improve the performance of a type of application or type of network or both. For example - SpeedScreen Latency Reduction provides local echo of text so that an end user gets high responsiveness from the system in case of a high latency network.

There are several reports that have done comparison of Presentation Server under different network and application scenarios. The following document summarizes the results well in case you are looking for data like this:

http://www.tolly.com/TS/2005/Citrix/PresentationServer/TollyTS205141CitrixPresentation%20ServerDecember2005.pdf

I would love to get your comments regarding what you have seen with Presentation Server as compared to other remoting technologies in your environment. Post as a comment or send me an email (sumit.dhawan@citrix.com).
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As I mentioned in my previous post, Project Ohio (Tech Preview available on http://www.mycitrix.com), contains some of the constellation technologies. I will write a bit about the Constellation technologies in Project Ohio targeted to improve user experience. But, before I do, let me answer some simple questions that I have received from my customer interactions.

Why do you care about user experience?

Majority of you probably do not need to read my notes regarding why user experience matters. It has always mattered; however, it is extremely critical now with IT management and CIOs top priorities being to serve the business and deliver on business value of IT. So, rather than focusing on reduced costs and better manageability, IT teams are turning into delivering the best to business with measurable results.

What are the challenges with user experience?

For those of you who have been working with Citrix technologies for a long time, you probably understand that Citrix technologies (WinFrame/MetaFrame) have always been challenged with different types of networks for desktop and application delivery (modems, ISDN, Internet). Citrix, via ICA, has continued to address different types of challenges for emerging networks and applications via SpeedScreen technologies. Project Ohio is going to add more to SpeedScreen technology portfolio to address emerging network scenarios and applications.

Things that we started with for Project Ohio were - high latency network being caused by globalization (outsourcingmulti-sourcing/offshoring) and more graphics applications as integration of several items of applications start (example - maps, graphs, images). Both of these are use cases that we are seeing increasing with CPS and will possibly impact your deployments over time as well. However, the technologies covered here are not limited to those and we are seeing more responsive environment with better bandwidth utilization for all types of networks, apps and usage.
/>SpeedScreen Technologies in Ohio

Frame-based display

With CPS 4 and before, ICA protocol queues up display commands coming from the server and sends only the relevant ones to the client to reduce the traffic on the network. It is quite optimized to not send excessive traffic. In an ideal world, we would toss out all the packets that were redundant and would only send the packets that were necessary to provide the right display to users. The reason there is need to toss out packets is because the screen draws are coming in much faster than they can be delivered remotely to clients. The need is exacerbated with graphics intensive apps or higher latency networks.

With Project Ohio, we have added technology to optimize tossing the redundant packets for new types of applications being written or when apps are accessed over high latency networks. The tossing algorithm has been enhanced so that now we are looking for more graphics constructs. It now detects complete self contained This way the server can either toss the entire frame or send the entire frame to the client as a self-contained entity. This has the following benefits:

1. Less data on the wire due to improved tossing operation
2. Better responsiveness for end users because the entire frame gets updated at once rather than in parts.

Progressive Display

This is the most visible change for Ohio. When enabled, the first/initial display of any complex image is always displayed using the highest (the progressive) compression setting, to provide a fast initial response over a slow line. This initial/crude display is then sharpened up as background activity so long as the bitmap itself has not now been overwritten, and that no new drawing is happening. New drawing always takes precedence over sharpening.

This will improve the usability for any user working over a lower bandwidth connection. There are several common use cases that will benefit from this enhancement - such as scrolling through a document or graphs, images, etc. For example - we are noticing that healthcare PACS based applications (X-Ray, etc.) are going to perform in a manner where it is hard to tell that they are running remotely.

There are other ICA enhancements made to provide better responsiveness to end users. You will likely notice those with your graphics apps or high latency networks right away. If you have either one of those two, take a look at Ohio Tech Preview.

Orestes forgot to talk about the Constellation session that I conducted at iForum. He lied when he said that the only session we had where we talked about Presentation Server was on Project Ohio. In addition, I had a session on Constellation technologies and where we are headed around Presentaion Server going forward (and the session was equally full []

I took an easier way out with my presentation. Instead of preparing and presenting all the content myself, I brought up folks that actually architect the product and write code on the stage to talk about stuff that they are doing for Constellation. I thought we had a lot of fun on the stage and my job was simple - (attempt to) make some jokes and make the way for the next presenter.

As part of Constellation, I talked about three areas that Citrix is committed to innovating in:

1. End user experience

2. Reduced Complexity

3. Application Compatibility

There are Constellation technologies being built to address those three areas. Project Ohio is in fact the first release when you will start seeing some of these technologies taking life. If you havent done so already, I highly encourage you to take a look at the Tech Preview for Ohio available on mycitrix.com. You will find how there is a significant boost in end user responsiveness with Project Ohio. talk about end user experience, I had Brad Pedersen, Chief Architect and Senior Fellow at Citrix, employee #1 at Citrix and one of the founders of ICA protocol with me on the stage. Brad talked about a lot of cool stuff that we are doing within ICA protocol as well as in our client UI to give users further Local/Remote transparency and better performance/responsiveness than when an application is running locally. Brad has recently prepared a video on Citrix history that you can view at http://www.citrixvirtualization.com

I plan to talk about all these three areas of Constellation in subsequent blogs. If you attended iForum, you can download my (or I should say slides at http://www.citrixiforum.com

This is the first time (after a very very long time) that we presented future technologies and directions at iForum and with some concrete framework. I would love to know from those who were at the event, how the session was and whether you like to see that presented in a webinar open to all.

(written couple of days ago on a plane - posted late - Blame it on the jet lag or all the iForum running around!) about 45000 miles across 5 different countries in Asia Pacific, I am on my way back to the US. Trust me, I had my share of cancelled, unconfirmed and delayed flights and long hours in airplanes, airports or hotels. But, I spoke with several IT professionals working at our customers, prospects, partners, competitors and industry analyst organizations.

If I were to summarize one observation and take-away, I think it would be around the confusion that exists in the market for the wide range of technologies that are now available for IT to leverage. It has been relatively simpler world for IT so far (at least when compared to what we have for us in the future) - you would install your desktop and applications on users devices, lock those devices down and you had your desktop infrastructure ready for most part. And then for apps that did not work in that environment for one reason or the other - either because your users required access from different locations, or because they were too hard to manage on desktops or they did not perform well on user desktops, you would decide to centralize them. That sums up the current state of architectures that you will see in most organizations. Application Lifecycle management ends up being an afterthought and is now being put into place as an incremental technology add to existing architectures.

However, there are now relevant market catalysts that are now forcing the organizations to re-think their architectures. The top 3 catalysts are:

a. Refresh cycles - The dreaded PC Refresh Cycle always gets you. There will be about 400M PC Refreshes that will occur between now and 2010. Ouch!

b. Compliance and Security - IT made some quick band-aids for solving their immediate problems with regulations. Now, they are turning at the strategic re-architectures for their sustained ability to follow regulations more effectively.

c. Growth - Believe it or not, this is acting to be one of the biggest catalysts - where IT are being asked to support organizational growth through M outsourcing, offshoring, etc. in a very agile manner - causing IT to think about new architectures that they can roll out broadly.

At the same time, there are myriad of technologies available with overlapping benefits, even though they all have a place for themselves. Example - streaming, virtualization such as CPS/TS, desktop streaming, Virtual Desktops or Dynamic Desktops as you will hear it from Citrix during iForum, etc.

I found several IT professionals confused about how they can pick the right architecture as they go through their architecture evaluations. what I see works, I will offer one recommendation that may sound simple and obvious, but is hardly followed and can actually be very hard to implement due to political boundaries within organizations.

My mantra is to STAGE DESIGN - i.e., separate your desktop delivery strategy from your application delivery strategy.

We often try to create an architecture that has desktops and applications all bundled into a single environment for the users. However, by separating the two, I have personally seen how IT organizations have been able to come up with a cost-effective and agile architecture. So, how do you build it?

1. Pick desktops for your users - split them into three categories - Office workers (those who spend a large majority of their time connected to the network) or Mobile Workers (such as Road Warriors, etc.). In most organizations, your office workers will constitute about 80% of your workforce. It makes sense to then pick the right desktop delivery strategy for these users. The desktop delivery strategy includes - devices, networks and as Citrix calls it Dynamic Desktops (delivered not deployed) - read more at http://www.citrixvirtualization.com. Different types of office users will need different levels of personalization - so you can build the right type of desktop for each user based on their needs. Dynamic Desktop is a broader topic for a post in the future. For users in mobile categories, you pick the appropriate devices (you may need more than one) and either decide to install or virtualize their desktops. Think about your applications - Now you profile your applications and pick the right architecture for delivering those apps. Some apps will be desktop based and some large line of business apps such as Oracle Financials or SAP will be best delivered via technologies like CPS. The more an app looks like client/server the more economies CPS will provide for the environment.

This could mean that you can have two tiers of centralization. One tier of published desktops and another tier of published applications. In fact, the most succesful implementations of CPS that I have seen are based on that architecture. This architecture provides the best modularity and efficiency for IT teams. Does it require extra hardware? At the end of the day, our customers tell us that it does not because they have optimized the hardware for the type of applications through silo environment and they are able to get the right hardware for the capacity and build out this two-tier environment with almost the same amount of hardware as they would have built with one-tier approach.

Bottom line - as you are thinking about new architectures, try to split your design into two distinct stages. The more decoupling you can do in both your design efforts as well as your architecture the better it will be for long term even if it requires purchasing a little bit of extra hardware to begin with. Those capital costs will very quickly offset the gains that you will get in your environment over time.

I am looking forward to get back to the US and head to iForum - few more days of hotel rooms and then I can go back to home!

I am still on my trip through Pacific and I made a stop in India.

I got a chance to speak with a customer of Citrix who is using Presentation Server for a very small deployment - a typical few seats of CPS for few remote users for 1 or two applications. They are happy with the product and the functionality and now they are thinking about their application delivery strategy. This customer is a large auto financing organization based out of India that provides loans for buying cars to individuals in many countries in Asia and are also expanding into South Africa and Australia. The CIO of the company was aware of CPS; however, did not think of it as any more than a access thing And, Citrix teams are often cornered into non-strategic. Sounds familiar?

This customer is now thinking about building an application delivery strategy for their CRM and office productivity applications for their branch offices and dealers, who sit in every location in every country across Asia. These are not large cities, but small locations but still servicing thousands of customers (think about the number of people in India and China alone). As we all know, CPS definitely is an ideal solution for this environment, which is why they got interested in Citrix. The internal Citrix teams have been selling the benefits of the technology to the CIO, but with limited success.

I rarely go into the customer meetings to sell, since my role is to collect customer input (more inbound rather than outbound). But, here I am in this sales situation with the CIO where it is going to be either a go or a no-go with centralized application delivery model. After few minutes of the CIO explaining his environment and challenges to us, he asks me to give him 5 reasons why he should consider centralization of applications. (At this time my mind is trying recollect the top 5 points and prioritize them with what I learnt from him about his challenges but my passion of working with the technologies for more than 9 years took over and I walked up on the white board in the room). I start with:

1. User performance over unmanaged network and device - blah, blah, we know the story

2. Manageability - unmanaged devices means hard to install applictions locally

Up until now he was slightly warm and interested, but he had heard enough of that already. So, the third thing that I discussed was quite different:

3. Visibility Control over user experience - This is where I talked about EdgeSight (not the product but the ability to monitor end user experience). I wont go into product details as you can check it out at http://www.citrix.com/edgesight.

I was getting ready to write my fourth point on the white board, when the CIO interrupted me and he said AM SOLD I didnt beleive what I heard (due to his accent). He then started telling me his current set of challenges where his end users complain about performance and when he checks with his network team, database team, application team they all give him their reports where everything looks good or dont make sense to him. He said that this is the biggest problem for him and he was quick to understand how centralization with EdgeSight will be able to help him a great deal. He also told me that this was something that impacted his personal reputation within business and this is what he and his peers in a worldwide CIO forum complain about. He asked his team to start on the deployment ASAP and we stopped talking about the benefits any more (still had the marker in my hand).

I definitely got a great deal of gratification from hearing those words; but more importantly I learnt what CIOs need at this point of time. So for those of you like me who beleive in centralized application environment but have a hard time explaining to your CIOs or senior management within IT, you have something to tell your story.

Just an insight into all of you blog readers that we plan to offer an integrated solution with the next release of Presentation Server, where all the end user performance data collection will be integrated with ICA client and CPS. We will talk more about it at iForum next week. />

Honest confession, I dont know what I would have said for #4 and #5 points. That could be an interesting discussion in itself. If I recall, what was on my mind - I would have gone with Data Security and Easier ability to integrate new organizations (since they are growing rapidly). What do you think?

Ok - I will jump from philosophical and business blog to a bit more technology/$$ blog. Technology and $$ - what? Let me explain. part of my trip to Sydney, I met with a Citrix customer - a large local insurance provider. They use Presentation Server for selective client/server applications for their remote users in their branch offices. I say a very typical enterprise Citrix customer/user. As part of my meeting, I had two interesting discussions with the customer - one about their overall desktop and application delivery strategy and the other one about 64-bit and financial implications. I will write another blog post for the discussion I had regarding application delivery strategy.

This post is about 64-bit technologies. In the room, we had IT managers, Desktop strategists and Citrix architects. There were contemplating 64-bit technologies. They have heard a lot about the benefits of 64-bit technologies when it comes to Terminal Services or CPS; however, they were stuck in a simple loop -

you adopt 64-bit technologies, cost of server hardware increases in order to support more users per server pretty linearly - so why do I move up to 64-bit for my Citrix server?

Lets do some math.

32-bit

Just to take an example, if one spends say $5K per server to support 50 users per server with 32-bit, it means that they will spend a total of about $100 per concurrent user.

64-bit

A server than can support 3-4 times more users per server, especially for applications that are memory bound (which was the case for most of the applications in the case of this customer), you will probably need to get a much bigger server with much more memory making your total capital expense per server to be about $20K for supporting 200 concurrent users. In other words about $100 per concurrent users.

ME THE MONEY! (It was tempting to put that in - wont happen again in this blog)

Of course the finance person in the room say - where are my savings? And, it is a legit question because if you are looking for savings to occur in capital costs they may be marginal, if any.

So, I asked them a simple question - how do they calculate their operating costs? They told me that they use a simple formula as a factor of capital costs. There lies the problem for adoption of 64-bit technologies.

What the problem?

Did you know that you spend about $7 in operating expenses for ever $1 of capital expenses in 32-bit technologies. And, you spend about a quarter/year on power for every $1 for capital expenses. These figures come from IDC who conduct a worldwide analysis of actual customer expenses for server infrastructure.

So, when IT budgets are being created they are created with the same formulas. In the meantime, the technology is changing very rapidly. Virtual Machines and 64-bit technologies are helping consolidate the server infrastructure in the data center for the primary reason for cutting down on operating costs. Virtual Machines have a similar argument - if you simply used VMs to cut down on capital costs, you will only get a benefit of around 15-20%, according to a study done by an Australian ASP and Data Center Services provider. The real savings come from significant shrinkage of operating expenses.

However, this is hard for financial departments to understand because there are no benchmarks or industry analyst studies for them to understand this. While this particular customer understood the value and they are going to re-evaluate the situation; however, it is an added complexity in 64-bit technology adoption that cannot be ignored.

What is the solution?

Like every other technology, 64-bit will go through its own adoption curve - where IT organizations that are more strategic and can manage risks of adopting new technologies more effectively will be able to adopt it earlier. As a result, folks like IDC will publish their operating expense factors to be much less than 7 times, which will kick-off a much broader adoption by majority.

So, what should you do? recommendation for consodlidation technologies like 64-bit and VMs is to adopt it where it makes sense, so you do not get a shock and pressure from your finance teams a year or two from now when they cut down your operaitng expense budgets due to revised IDC figures. Those operating expense budgets are due for revision - be prepared to handle them by adopting the technologies in time.

Are others doing it?

Within Citrix customer base, we have a very high interest in the adoption of 64-bit technologies (over 80% intend to adopt in the next 12 months) and we have 10% of our large customer base already using 64-bit technologies succesfully.

Bottom line - look beyond the capital expnses for 64-bit. Even though you are not worried about operating expenses today; however, It is the future and we need to embrace it. The sooner you do the better !

Happy 64-bitting!

Even though I do not see anyone really reading these blogs, I will continue my postings anyways.

My APAC trip started with attending a seminar by IDC in Auckland, New Zealand. It was a great seminar delivered by Matt Eastwood, Vice President of Enterprise Platforms at IDC. The topic of the seminar was SOA and Virtualization (or Virtualisation as they would spell it in New Zealand). I want to highlight some of the best tid-bits of information from that session.

What do CEOs, CFOs and CIOs think of leveraging the power of IT?

Most CEOs and CFOs want to leverage IT much more than how it is leveraged across the organizations. However, CIOs on the other hand are much more conservative about their goals of leveraging IT for the organizations. It makes me wonder that we have entered a completely different era where CEOs and CFOs see the value of IT and want to leverage it much more effectively. CIOs on the other hand are given smaller budgets and are asked to do more with less. So, it got me thinking as to what made IT go through the change.

During my conversations with other CIO and IT-Director attendees at the event, I asked them about their opinion. I got a simple answer is king! Users need access to information regardless of where they are. They see the value of having access to the information and they need it everywhere IT can possibly imagine. IT, on the other hand, is still running their environments with a different mindset, i.e. how they can operate their existing environments effectively. That is where the difference in view point lies.

So, what does that mean? That means that businesses need IT to be functioning more effectively as a service so that the power of information can be leveraged more effectively by the end users. We all need to start thinking that way - so when we are thinking about our strategies, lets keep our customers in mind - i.e. the end users. The end users are the ones whose requirements and satisfactions need to be satisfied. If we all take user prospective while formulating our architectures and strategies, we will soon discover that different users have different needs, when it comes to access scenarios, access devices or access security. We need to provide the best possible architecture to meet the needs of different kinds of users. While one architecture for all users had worked in the past; however, in order to be competitive in the industry and meet your end user access needs, we need to think about best architecture for different applications for different user requirements.

Remember, end users need access to information - so think about their requirements while kicking off new projects, rather than focusing all your efforts on IT efficiency and IT optimization. Remember - is king! />

Welcome to Citrix Presentation Server product team blog. My name is Sumit Dhawan and I lead the Product Management team for Citrix Presentation Server. The Product Management team at Citrix is responsible for Product Roadmap, Product Strategy and Product Lifecycle

I have been with Citrix for almost 9 years now and have played different roles, including developing some of the core components of IMA in MetaFrame XP 1.0 - some of you who have been playing with Citrix technologies for long time would know all about. Its been long enough for me to do any more useful programming for Citrix. These days I handle product roadmap and product strategy for Presentation Server product line. This blog is where the Presentation Server Product Management team gets to express ourselves for what we do; expect to see us write about our customer visit stories, future product strategies and opinions about future technology directions. In addition, we plan to have guest bloggers including Product Architects, Market Researchers, Product Developers, Product Support specialists and Product Marketers to discuss topics related to Presentation Server.

Most of the team members are new to having their own blogs, but I do expect that all of us will have fun doing this. Through these blogs, we plan to share our experiences, opinions and priorities, and look forward to having interesting virtual discussions. As Product Managers, we love getting both positive and critical feedback on the product. We always want to know whatever is on your mind; so do not hesitate to speak up!

I thought hard about what the best way will be of starting the Citrix Presentation ServerProduct Management blog. I could have started with a note about our product strategy, technology directions or some technical architecture stuff But,I decided that I will have plenty of opportunities to cover that stuff. Instead, I will start with writing what I like doing the best in my job, i.e. speaking with customers about their Citrix implementations and getting their feedback on what working and what not.

I am writing this on a plane going to Auckland, New Zealand. I am starting a 3 week customer trip in Asia Pacific starting October 2nd. On this multi-city trip, I plan to speak with several customers around the world at all levels - executives, Citrix administrators, technology architects, etc. In this blog, I will share my entire trip with you with a summary of my customer discussions. You can learn how other Citrix customers like yourself are using our products and what challenges they are running into.

/>I will also try to share interesting local stories in different cities as I visit them. So RSS this one and come back and visit us as I update this story line from one city to another.

Arrived in Auckaland and posted this article.