Citrix mounts Acropolis, offers support for Nutanix citizenry

No need to beware of geeks bearing gifts, this time

The Parthenon, part of the Acropolis citadel

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Nutanix is getting welcome support from Citrix for its brand-new KVM-based hypervisor effort.

Citrix, whose CEO Mark Templeton is on the way out, is under pressure from activist investor Elliott Management as it supports the whole Acropolis product set – which has now become "Citrix Ready", in Citrix-speak.
Acropolis can be used as the base for Citrix XenDesktop (VDI) and XenApp (app virtualisation) products.
Nutanix's Xtreme Computing Platform running the Acropolis Hypervisor has been verified as Citrix Ready for XenApp and XenDesktop 7.6, as well as NetScaler and ShareFile.
It's good news for Nutanix, and Citrix will be hoping that Acropolis adoption will help it survive competition from VMware and Microsoft.
Nutanix blogger Kees Baggerman said: "With Citrix Ready certification from Citrix for XenDesktop on Acropolis Hypervisor, we can deploy VMs hosted on Acropolis Hypervisor with the Citrix VDA installed. Combining that with an intelligent script framework based on PowerShell, we’re able to deploy VDI or RDSH-based VMs that are ready to provide desktops and/or applications to your users."
He said that the "next phase will be to provide an integrated deployment method that will support automated machine catalog management on MCS (Citrix Machine Creation Service)."
Anything such as this, that makes life simpler for users and admins, will be good, and if Nutanix Acropolis/Citrix performs better than Nutanix/VMware then so much the better.
Citrix and Nutanix are planning to formally support XenApp and XenDesktop software on Acropolis Hypervisor in September. ®

Microsoft, Symantec, VMware, Citrix, Red Hat to dominate $2.6 bn application virtualization industry

According to a report by Research and Markets, the global application virtualization market is expected to grow from USD 1.3 Billion in 2015 to USD 2.6 Billion by 2020, at an estimated Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 14.9% from 2015 to 2020.

The key players of this market are Microsoft Corporation, Symantec Corporation, VMware, Inc., Citrix Systems, Inc., and Red Hat, Inc.

Image used for representation purpose only. Agencies

The most serious concern of today's IT industries is to minimize the maintenance cost and maximize productivity. To achieve this, it is important for an industry to optimally use its resources. There are diverse operating systems available in the market with their own set of operating environment, features, file system, registry, support to the applications, etc. This prevents the use of an application developed considering a specific operating system to be executed on another. To use such applications one need to switch among the operating systems that support the application. This is a very tedious task for the user. Application virtualization is the solution to this problem. It allows the execution of an application under a non-native operating system. It acts as an interface between the two.

Application virtualization basically translates the machine code of the application written according to its native operating system into the machine code of the non-native operating system where it is intended to be executed by the user. At the core of application virtualization, there are four important modules: input/output interface, graphics interface, hardware interface, and library functions interface. The main drivers of the market include the adoption of third platform among SMBs, decrease in administering cost of IT systems, licensing & support policies, and increase in speed & efficiency.

The global application virtualization market has been segmented on the basis of applications, platforms, technologies, services, end users, verticals, and regions. The types of applications are application security virtualization, business function as a service, and virtual application management; the platform types include native platform virtualization and full platform virtualization, and the technology types include file I/O redirection, registry redirection, com isolation, dot net isolation, service isolation, application isolation, and driver isolation.

According to another report by RnR Market Research firm, enterprises are adapting application virtualization market products and services to implement better speed, efficiency, and improvement in the operational process. Application virtualization includes the dynamic delivery of applications so that they can be accessed online, offline, or anywhere. With the deployment of application virtualization the enterprises achieve flexibility in their overall workflow management.

Application virtualization is beneficial as compared to software virtualization and can easily be integrated with server virtualization which increases the speed and efficiency of overall IT system of the organization. It allows the execution of the incompatible application side by side at the same time. Application virtualization can also be integrated with application streaming, which streams a portions of the virtualized application to user's computers as required. These factors help for the increasing adoption of the application virtualization market solutions.

Citrix's new CEO will need to embrace the competition in areas where they don't lead

On yesterday’s podcast, Gabe, Jack, and I talked about Citrix’s challenges for the year ahead. At one point we were talking about their new CEO, and Jack asked me, “What do you do if you’re the new CEO of Citrix?"

The most important thing is that Citrix has to let their customers build custom solutions around best-of-breed products, even if those products are not from Citrix!

Let me explain...

Citrix is really good at XenApp and XenDesktop. It’s a huge business and the reason that most Citrix customers are Citrix customers.

About ten years ago, Citrix started down the “suite” path (as many vendors did). So now if you look at the Citrix suite, it’s not just XenApp and XenDesktop, but it’s other products like ShareFile, XenMobile, NetScaler, etc.

Here’s the problem. While most customers buy Citrix for XenApp and XenDesktop, Citrix as a company has been trying to force/grow their footprint/stranglehold by creating “first class” integration between XenApp/XenDesktop and ShareFile, XenMobile, and NetScaler.

In other words, ShareFile integrates with XenApp/XenDesktop and all the Receiver clients in a great way—better than any other enterprise file sync & share product such as Dropbox, Box, or OneDrive. XenApp/Desktop integrates with XenMobile better than any other EMM product like MobileIron, AirWatch, or Good. And XenApp/XenDesktop integrates with NetScaler better than any other application delivery controller such as F5.

This is a problem for Citrix, because while most customers choose Citrix because of XenApp/XenDesktop, theydon’t choose Citrix because of ShareFile, they don’t choose Citrix because of XenMobile, and they don’tchoose Citrix because of NetScaler.

So if a customer wants to use XenApp/XenDesktop with Box, they get a second-rate, less-integrated experience. If they want to use XenApp/XenDesktop with MobileIron, they get a second-rate, less-integrated experience. If they want to use F5, they get a second-rate, less-integrated experience.

Back in the day, Citrix MetaFrame was the best-of-breed product that could be easily integrated with other best-of-breed products. But today, if a customer wants to use XenApp, XenDesktop, Box, MobileIron, and F5, they do not get a fully integrated, delightful experience. The only way a customer can get that fully-integrated, full-potential, first class experience, they have to use second-, third-, or fourth-rate products with their best-of-breed XenApp/XenDesktop.

Being a Citrix customer in 2015 means that you’re forced to compromise. It is literally impossible for Citrix customers today to have best-of-breed across the board. This is Citrix’s death warrant.

Now imagine the alternative. What if Citrix actually made a real effort to make Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, and every other EFSS product integrate with XenApp/XenDesktop as smoothly and nicely as ShareFile? Certainly the other EFSS vendors would jump on board because they’d like access to Citrix’s huge install base, and they’d love to provide their customers with a nice, integrated, first-class experience. The same is true for the other product sectors too.

To be clear, I’m not saying it’s bad that Citrix has their own EFSS, EMM, and ADC products. I’m just saying that Citrix needs to make sure that all of these types of products are are first class citizens within their ecosystem. For every dollar they spend developing ShareFile, they need to spend a dollar making sure XenApp/XenDesktop integrates with all the competitive products too.

The days of 90s and 2000s monolithic suites are over. Today’s CIOs want to buy the best-of-breed products in every category, and for $500 per user for XenApp/XenDesktop, you can expect they want their other best-of-breed products to integrate in a first class way. Citrix’s new CEO needs to embrace the reality that Citrix is never going to lead in all these categories, and even if they could, they’re never going to convince all their customers to go with the entire Citrix stack. It’s time to hug the competition instead of trying to force products where they don’t lead onto their customers. Citrix needs to create a world where buying Citrix doesn’t mean their customers have to compromise in other areas.

 - Brian Madden Citrix Blog

Citrix aims to woo VMware customers with free migration perks

Citrix is now offering customers of rival virtualization vendor VMware a steep discount if they migrate platforms.

The short-term offer will give VMware Horizon customers 50 percent off licenses when they switch to Citrix Workspace Suite, which includes the XenApp and XenDesktop virtualization products. Citrix is promising that VMware defectors will experience zero downtime, zero disruption and no productivity loss.

Citrix offered up a few examples of XenDesktop's supposed superiority, such as faster image updates, reduced bandwidth requirement for HTML5 access, and better performance on printing, saving files and launching apps."If you thought migration would be hard and time-consuming, then we have some good news for you," Citrix's director of technical marketing Vishal Ganeriwala wrote in a blog post. "The migration service can help you migrate in less than 15 minutes with almost no downtime if you have a XenDesktop environment deployed. Now, do I have your attention?"

While these types of discounts and incentives are common among competing telcos and tech vendors, the Citrix offer is notable because of its timing: VMware's VMworld conference is currently underway in San Francisco.

Citrix has also taken aim against VMware's "one cloud, any application, any device" strategy. The slogan is a central theme at this year's VMworld and encompasses the company's vision for any app, running at all times on any device through a software-defined infrastructure model.

Citrix counters the notion as cloud restrictive and has been tweeting the hashtag WhyOnlyOne.