Signing off

Well that's it folks, I'm on holiday now until 5th January so a last few words to wish you all a very merry Christmas and an even merrier New Year. Or, if you're Chinese, enjoy continuing work as normal until January 26th.

It's been an eventful year, virtualisation has taken a foothold and steadily makes its way towards mass market, only now to be replaced with the next IT buzzwords: Cloud Computing or Software as a Service (SaaS) - more on that in the New Year.

Citrix tricked us all into attending 2 Summits in Orlando, when actually Summit will not now happen in the autumn (which was the reason behind having a second Summit and aligning it properly), it's happening in the spring in Las Vegas. Still, I didn't mind, I got to play 4 new fantastic Florida golf courses.

The usual software product updates showed no sign of slowing down, XenApp 5.0 was probably the most important of these, although XenServer 5.0 was a huge improvement too, and XenDesktop finally hit the market.

The COMPUTERLINKS product portfolio shrunk, then grew, then shrunk a bit and we were ultimately snapped up by Barclays Private Equity. The credit crunch started to nip at our ankles, then steadily worked its way up the leg -and is now well and truly savaging many companies' crown jewels.

Personally, I can look back on a very successul and rewarding 12 months. Work has been good, we have shown considerable growth this year, and I got married in September to the most wonderful person in the world. Still can't get used to wearing this ring though, I've already (almost) lost it several times.

And, last but not least, I am extremely pleased about the birth, and subsequent first unsteady steps, of this blog. In just 7 months, it has gone from zero to... wait for it... over 1,000 visitors! And, for 6 or 7 weeks of that, my Google Analytics counter wasn't working properly, so it's actually probably many more than that. I am truly over the moon that people share an interest in what I write and I look forward to continuing with it next year. Until then, I wish all readers a very enjoyable and relaxing festive period. Be good - and if you can't be good, be good at it.

Rupert

Citrix always gets the blame

I know this is geek humour rather than real humour, but I found an amusing entry this morning on Computerworld blogs, which I hope they don't mind me slightly amending here. Just goes to show why Citrix brought out EdgeSight - Citrix automatically gets the blame for everything!

A user catches their administrator in the hallway and asks her to look at his PC, because Microsoft Outlook takes soooo long to come up when he launches it. "I thought maybe he was referring to a Citrix log-in problem, as my organization works in a Citrix environment," says admin. "I watched him log into Outlook and saw a reminder window pop up."

Then several more reminders appear. And more. And still more.

When the count reaches about 20, the user tells admin that this is going to take a while. Admin offers to clean them out while user goes back to his meeting.

"Apparently he had not been 'dismissing' any of his appointment reminders in quite some time," admin says. "It took over an hour for all the reminders to finally come up. And no wonder - this user had 1,611 of them. I have now shown him how to dismiss an appointment, so hopefully they won't stack up again."

Citrix XenServer: Phoenix from the flames?

It's been over a year now since Citrix announced their acquisition of XenSource and eventually re-branded not only the server virtualisation product to XenServer but also their flagship product, Presentation Server, to XenApp. The theory behind this was that the term Xen = virtualisation and the second section of the word simply denoted which kind. XenDesktop followed earlier this year and, not forgetting NetScaler, we had the Citrix Delivery Center (sic).

As an original distributor of XenSource before the acquisition, we have been pushing XenServer for some time now. As such, it has been really disappointing for it not to have taken off in the way we all wanted. This is, of course, music to VMWare's ears and Mike DiPetrillo, a VMWare employee and prolific blogger, took a swipe at it a few weeks ago. Furthermore, one of the analysts I speak to quite regularly ceased regarding XenServer as a viable competitor in the server virtualisation space quite some time ago. All in all, not great news, particularly when you recall the extent of Citrix's investment. 500 million dollars was looking like a snip when you considered how heavily the announcement rained on VMWare's IPO parade, but, at that stage, the sales were expected to back up that PR coup much more effectively than they have. Even Roger Baskerville has jumped ship and I've met few people more enthusiastic about XenServer as he was (with the notable exception of Simon Crosby of course).

All of this puts me in a slightly difficult position. Regular readers might expect me to try and vindicate the XenServer-naysayers; they would no doubt also expect me to pour considerable scorn over Citrix's continued claims that it is gaining in market share and they would surely expect me to join the growing ranks of doubters about its future. In actual fact, a part of me wants to because it would be both easy and fun, but, after careful consideration, I won't do anything of the sort. And here's why.

Citrix XenServer is only now, with the recent version 5.0 release, capable of going toe-to-toe with VMWare and not coming away with much more than perhaps a bit of a fat lip. Unfortunately for Citrix, all the hype around XenServer was at a time when the product was, shall we say, in the "catching-up phase" and VMWare didn't have many problems defending its territory. Nowadays, it is a much more able competitor, as recent high-profile wins at Tesco and SAP have gone some way to proving. Customers will see a completely different product in proof of concepts now - one that has undergone 3 major releases in a year and is now true enterprise class.

Secondly, there is still a massive market out there for virtualisation. Virtually (pun fully intended) every presentation I've seen in the past couple of years has included a slide saying only 8%/10%/12% of servers are currently virtualised. Talking to one of my contacts at Citrix recently, he highlighted an article that the magazine The Economist had recently published stating that data centres account for 1.5% of America's carbon emissions - and this figure is growing each year. Bearing in mind the airline industry accounts for 1.8% (and think how much criticism they come under), should we not be thinking about ways to reduce this before the tree-huggers realise and start torching our X5s?

If you put XenApp on XenServer, Citrix tell us you can get 73% more users on a box. If someone brought out a product that reduced the airline industry's carbon emissions by 73%, they'd be a very rich person indeed. That last statement is deliberately obtuse and wildly inaccurate by the way, but you get the point - recession or no recession, there is a lot of cash out there and, regardless of VMWare's revenues, Citrix XenServer is still ideally positioned to be successful because it solves a major problem. I listened to an excellent soothsayer at the COMPUTERLINKS University recently. Do you know what people will spend most of their IT budgets on in the next few years? Correct. Virtualisation.

Thirdly, I just get the feeling there is too much going on for it not to be a success in the end. Citrix have signed OEM agreements with Dell, HP, NEC and one or two others, they have teamed up with Marathon to offer industry-leading high availability and NetApp and Dell EqualLogic on the storage side, they seem to be able to develop at about twice the speed of others, you can interchange XenServer VMs with Microsoft VMs as and when you like, they have a great industry spokesman in Simon Crosby, the market is going the way they want and, perhaps most significantly, COMPUTERLINKS is no longer the leading disti in the UK. I say this with a tinge of irony because of course it's been great being top disti for XenServer most of the year but, having now been overtaken, it's a sign that the big boys in the Citrix channel are starting to take it on, not just the specialists that have been selling it up to now.

Don't get me wrong, VMWare will remain the top dog for a long time to come but don't write off Citrix XenServer just yet. If nothing else, it gives customers a real choice for a change.

Almost ir-RES-istible

Last week I attended the Distributor Conference for RES Software, one of the multitude of Citrix/VMWare eco-system vendors. If you haven't heard about RES, you should really take a look - it's one of the software makers that doesn't get half the respect it deserves. And I don't say that just because COMPUTERLINKS works with them as a distributor, but because I know what a great product they offer.

RES are a Dutch company based in the south of the Netherlands, not too far from Eindhoven. They actually have an enormous feature list but only (currently) two products: Powerfuse and Wisdom. Oddly, the huge list of capabilities represents as much of a challenge as it does an opportunity. Whilst a particular feature may prove a deal-clincher for one company, it may be totally irrelevant for the next. On the other hand, with the software capable of solving so many problems, it is highly unlikely there won't be one killer feature in there for everyone, thus pretty much any company that uses IT is a potential target.

In the same way as Citrix XenDesktop releases the operating system from its dependence on the device (as XenApp does with applications), Powerfuse essentially gives the "user workspace" independence from the operating system. By a workspace, RES mean all the personal settings that a user has, everything from the background picture of their kids to mapped drives and printers and email signatures. This is a very powerful ideology, particularly with the advent of virtual desktops, or VDI, and, as such, it is no surprise that RES count VMWare just about as important a partner as Citrix. Having said that, RES doesn't actually care how you deliver/deploy/install your apps, it works for every way.

Personally, I believe Citrix should have bought RES rather than the Sepago technology they did acquire to solve the problem of roaming profiles, they would have got an awful lot more functionality in RES. Brian Madden counts user workspace management as one of the 5 things he thinks need to happen before VDI can really take off. I have no idea why they didn't buy them, but then I am not privy to that sort of information. I can only presume they would've been too expensive, I would be surprised if the reason had had anything to do with the actual product.

The 2nd product, Wisdom, is a runbook automation product that relieves administrators of many painful and laborious tasks, such as setting up new user accounts, automating provisioning of resources, turning off devices overnight etc. Some of the techies here at COMPUTERLINKS worked out you could save the cost of Wisdom licenses in 6-9 months, just by turning off a few PCs at night and saving the energy they sap. Software that pays for itself in 9 months on one single feature is pretty good in anyone's book.

To be honest, some of what RES offers can be done in other ways, for example with group policies and Active Directory, however the simplicity of RES, added to the sheer amount of functionalities available, are certainly the major buying factors. Security is another one. A good example might be giving a user (doctor perhaps) a specific USB key (by registering the serial number of the USB to that person) and only allowing access to the system when the key is plugged into the device. As I say: possible with other products of course, but there really aren't any other vendors out there who can do so much for so little money.

RES is not without its challenges, not least in terms of awareness. Many have simply not heard of them. AppSense is RES' main competitor, particularly in their home market of the UK, however RES do offer one big advantage for British resellers and distributors and that is that, somewhat refreshingly, they refuse to take end user deals direct. AppSense are famous, or perhaps infamous, within the channel for betraying their partners when they feel like it.

I can't do RES any real justice on a short blog, except to recommend a trial. See for yourself. As regular readers will know, my blogs are fiercely independent and I wouldn't laud a product so openly if I didn't genuinely believe it myself.

It's a NetScaler Jim, but not as we know it

I think it's fair to say the NetScaler product line has never really been regarded by most as an integral part of the Citrix portfolio. Or at least the technology behind it is not typically something you would associate with Citrix. The buyers are different, the established Citrix channel partners don't always have the networking background required for it and Citrix's arch-rivals in this space, F5, do not compete on anything else that Citrix do. Citrix bought NetScaler a few years ago as a result of the great name it had made for itself powering most of the top portals on the web (Google, Amazon, MSN, Betfair and so on). Citrix rarely hesitate to remind you that 75% of Internet users go through a NetScaler box on any given day. However, the considerable success in the dot-com arena has not been replicated on the corporate side and F5 have had the finance sector, in particular, pretty much sewn up. Until recently that is. Such things as Microsoft Sharepoint and other vendors basing their future innovations very much around web-based front ends are pushing NetScaler's talents further into the limelight. NetScaler revenues from corporates are, for the first time ever, now superceding the dot-com results. Citrix's latest initiative is to build on recent customer successes in accelerating XenApp farms and, by convincing some of the more archetypal Citrix partners to take it on, try and fold this hitherto apparently undesirable stepchild into the Citrix family bosom.

The approach is to be two-fold. NetScaler is essentially a load balancer but has a huge array of more advanced capabilities such as offloading SSL traffic, application firewalling (from the purchase of Teros), multiplexing TCP connections, SSL VPN, caching and compression, to mention but a few. Often, a customer will buy NetScaler for just one or two of these capabilities but end up using more and more of them once the box is in and they become familiar with it.

XenApp is a domineering software, both in the sense that it is resource hungry as well as being a mission-critical, infrastructure-level software so load balancing is critical to performance. XenApp has a much more refined system of assigning users logging in to servers than Microsoft's default "round-robin" system, however it becomes problematic when you need to take things further and introduce fail-over data centres or more advanced DR capabilities for example. Global server load balancing and pro-active, on-the-fly content switching play a large part in enabling a more fault-tolerant, disaster-proof infrastructure, not to mention performance enhancements for the users. NetScaler can also improve XenApp farm performance considerably by relieving the servers of a lot of the XML brokering required to render applications and, of course, accelerating Web Interface, which a lot of companies now use instead of Program Neighborhood (sic).

This is, perhaps strangely, a relatively untapped market for Citrix but one with lots of potential and, crucially, one in which F5 are always going to be on the back foot. Citrix have optimised NetScaler for use with XenApp and competitors naturally aren't going to be able to compete. It is common knowledge that Citrix have over 200,000 customers. For non-disclosure reasons, I can't say how many of those currently employ NetScaler to do what I have outlined in this article, but we were told the figure at Summit last week and it is low.

The second factor that should help align NetScaler more closely with the general Citrix message is the dynamic data centre scenario that has been talked about for a while now. I wrote an article a few months ago about "green IT" (which I published on this blog in September) where I talked about how, in a perfect world, the use of servers (or even whole data centres) could be, or perhaps even should be, aligned more precisely to actual consumption requirements. Basically, I was advocating turning on boxes when they're needed and switching the things off when they're not. NetScaler could play a vital role in this.

The GSLB option does what you'd expect. In the event of a data centre fall-out, all traffic is re-routed elsewhere with no need for any DNS changes. Not only that, it also provides pro-active optimisation of traffic so users get the best service possible, regardless of where they are in the world. Add into the mix the other things NetScaler excels at - policy-based access control, SSL VPN, app firewalling (PCI DSS anyone?) etc. - and NetScaler arguably becomes not just integral, but actually the lynchpin of the truly dynamic data centre. Which is something of an improvement on being an unwanted stepchild.

And finally, we must remember the latest IT buzzword on everyone's lips: "cloud computing". Citrix announced at VMWorld that they now not only have the Citrix Delivery Center (sic) but also C3 - Citrix Cloud Center. This is an amalgamation of XenServer, WANScaler, Workflow Studio and, of course, NetScaler, designed specifically for this new wave of computing that many expect to overtake current architectures relatively quickly. (But cloud computing is a whole topic in its own right and, as such, shall be reserved for a future blog where I hope to also include some reflections on the recent tie-up with Akamai as I believe this could be crucial.)

Will all this help to sell more NetScalers? Almost certainly. I've not even talked about:

1) the fact that Citrix have developed configuration wizards to ease NetScaler deployments,
2) how easy it can be to convince an Access Gateway customer to upgrade to a NetScaler,
3) the imminent release of v9.0 where we can expect specific application integration and
4) that training programs are going online and will cost about 20% of what they used to.

There's a whole lot more to NetScaler than initially meets the eye, it's just a question of whether resellers (and customers) will see it.

Mixed fortunes for CTXS in Q308

Citrix announced their Q3 2008 results today and, whilst revenue growth is impressive ($399 million compared to $350 million and therefore 14% up on Q3 last year), profits have taken a bit of a hit. It has not gone unnoticed that what previously was a seemingly endless stream of acquisitions has come to a complete stop lately. The last two announcements that I can think of involving 3rd party companies, Sepago and Marathon, have been, in Sepago's case, a technology purchase rather than a full-blown company purchase and, in Marathon's case, an OEM agreement.

This isn't meant as a criticism, quite the contrary. I feel Citrix have enough on their plate for the time being getting the Delivery Centre up and running properly (integration of NetScaler, live release of Workflow Studio, ironing out of XenDesktop imperfections etc.), so adding yet further technologies this year might be pushing the boat out slightly too far. Added to that, after the not inconsiderable investments over the past few years (NetScaler, XenSource et al) a period of consolidation, which I presume we are now in, was certainly to be expected.

Good to see, however, that both Citrix and VMWare are bucking the economic trends and posting pretty solid results, all considered. I certainly have an optimistic outlook for the rest of this year. Full details on Citrix's performance here.

Bad eggs

Last week I attended a successful event staged by one of our key customers, Nebulas Solutions, in London. They recently formed a division called Nebulas Virtualise, which focusses, as you might expect, on virtualisation and related technologies. Nebulas also employ what they call a "Technology Incubator" to help them decide which products should be incorporated into their corporate portfolio of "fully" approved offerings. Essentially, they thoroughly test a specific product themselves, then introduce it to their early adopter type customers and, if all goes well, they transfer it to the mainstream. RES Software, one of the vendors I am responsible for at COMPUTERLINKS, has just been included in this, alongside RTO Software, which many readers might already know of, plus, in the security space, Tufin.

The event was based mainly around delivering Virtual Desktops and was therefore headlined by VMWare. Citrix was also mentioned quite a bit throughout, but of course only in terms of their server-based computing solution and, rather unimaginatively, in the context of what Citrix XenApp CAN'T do. (I must admit it took some self-control not to point out to the VMWare speaker that Citrix have spent the last 2 years telling customers that, yes, of course XenApp is not the ideal solution for every scenario, hence the evolution of XenDesktop to solve some of those problems, but that it is without doubt the lowest cost option. I kept my trap shut...)

What did strike me, however, is that the VMWare pitch around VDI was exactly the same, and I mean almost a carbon copy, of what Citrix are preaching. I don't mean that is a bad thing, quite the opposite actually, with two companies pushing the same messaging, it means the market may grow that much quicker. Which solution a customer ultimately then goes with will be decided by a load of other factors but, if the concept of virtual desktops itself is a quantifiably sound investment, at least my personal future is safe(ish).

So VMWare and Citrix are saying the same thing and, as I heard at the above event, an analyst from Gartner predicted a couple of years back that every single new desktop will be virtualised by the end of 2010 (!), why are they currently the only two companies in the world capable of providing this? OK, OK, I'm sure there are one or two others such as the perennial Ericom, Quest or even Symantec (and probably Microsoft in the future) who will, perhaps justifiably, claim they can do it too, but in all honesty, VMWare and Citrix are the two vendors that immediately spring to most educated minds on the mention of virtual desktops.

So why on earth, and this is actually the main point of this article, are the Citrix and VMWare channels probably the least profitable, in terms of margin retention for distributors and resellers, of just about any software product there is?

Citrix and VMWare develop highly complex infrastructure-level software solutions yet it seems some of the channel are happy to sell licenses at about the same margin levels as they retain on hardware. Any Tom, Dick or Harry can assemble a PC these days, my brother-in-law made one for my parents last Christmas, yet when it comes to revolutionising the way a company actually accesses applications, and therefore, ultimately, how they do business, why are we happy to "knock out" the licenses as though they are PCs? And, added to that, there are only perhaps 3 or 4 companies who can do this! Compare that to the amount of PC makers there are.

The reasons, in my opinion, all boil down to the same thing - bad eggs. I suspect there are many fickle end users, quite happy to let one reseller do all the preparatory work (sometimes free of charge) and then just buy the licenses off the company who eventually submits the lowest bid, often one who has had absolutely nothing to do with the project (so no cost of sale) and probably never will. Secondly, the reseller community adopt the same approach with the distributors and, thirdly, the one or two distributors who let this happen.

In the current economic climate, perhaps some acceptance of pricing pressure is necessary, but it seems to me that there are certain organisations (and believe me, I really wish I could name them here but I'm sure I'd be sued if I did so please Do Not Sue me), who defy any sort of sensible, long-term thinking for the industry as a whole. They are quite happy to offer ridiculous pricing to both resellers and end users who do not deserve it, in the vain hope of meeting this month's revenue target, come hell or high water.

We work in a competitive industry, sure, and I suppose that, in a sense, it's every man for himself when the proverbial hits the fan, but I think we also have a responsibility to ourselves and to our chosen career paths and specific areas of technology, to ensure that some modicum of value remains. Citrix and VMWare are market-leading, "best-of-breed" solutions and are therefore expensive to buy - rightly so. In the same way as Mercedes-Benz and BMW cars are market-leadingly expensive.

Whilst the vendors carry some responsibility to protect their brand and prevent it becoming yet another commodity item, their hands are tied to a point - certainly from a legal point of view, so surely the buck stops with the channel. (On the other hand, don't the vendors have the option to pick and choose which organisations are accepted into their channels?) Please don't think I am advocating a market where price-fixing becomes acceptable, we need only look at British Airways to see the ramifications of that sort of behaviour, all I'm calling for is that the prices charged for those software solutions that a) have a high cost of sale in terms of training, staffing levels, up-front investment etc. and b) provide answers to problems only a handful of companies are skilled enough and experienced enough to do, are fair, appropriate to effort and at a level that ensures everyone's futures.

Currently, I'm afraid, I get the distinct feeling those few bad eggs are spoiling things for all of us, the market is degenerating into a smash n' grab fest and for those of us actually serious about these technologies, the desire to further invest is evaporating quickly.

Citrix lives! (Albeit in a cloud)

Returning, as I do, with a glistening wedding ring on my finger, I must now live up to my new status as a mature, upstanding, married member of the community. Losing my phone on honeymoon wasn't the best start but I'll put it down to teething problems.

When I (temporarily) signed off a couple of weeks ago, it was a matter of days before VMWorld and I was utterly convinced that Citrix would announce an acquisition of the leading HA and fault tolerance vendor Marathon. In the end it turned out not to be a full takeover but, almost as good, a tight OEM agreement, building Marathon's utterly brilliant technology (I saw this running a while back and was gobsmacked) into the synchronised release of XenServer v5.0.

It just goes to show that Citrix's claims of continued openness to partnership and upholding the DNA of industry co-operation that existed at XenSource before they were snapped up, do indeed ring very true. VMWare, as usual, have been developing their own HA solution, which will surely be hard-pushed to match the might of the XenServer/Marathon solution. HA with XenServer is now available in three flavours ("dialable" is the latest irritating IT buzzword for this):

1) automatic re-start of VMs (which VMWare have had for some time),
2) component level fault tolerance (e.g. a disk or network card goes down and Marathon moves everything across instantaneously to the back-up server with little to no impact), effective within a radius of about 50km - depending on the speed of the connection obviously,
3) global full system "five nines" availability providing as good as zero downtime (Marathon has a customer who have been running EverRun for 9 years and they have had just 11 seconds downtime in that period). This is available now for physical servers, Q1 09 in a virtual environment.

So my prognosis below that Citrix would upstage VMWare yet again wasn't quite borne out to the extent I had hoped but I still think there was almost as much coverage from VMWorld about them as there was VMWare.

Which leads me to another topic that hit the headlines whilst I was away. Apparently Citrix was to be bought by Microsoft. There have been several references to this, e.g. here, here and here, the latter of which led to two industry heavyweights, Brian Madden and Doug Brown, rather amusingly having a bit of a tiff about it, but, as we now know, it has all fizzled out to nothing. Again.

Microsoft buying Citrix must be one of the oldest rumours in the industry and it never seems to go away. Surely we must only ask ourselves the question why? What on earth would Microsoft get from buying Citrix? Sure, Citrix have better technology in most areas but would MS's shareholders really agree to a CapEx of what would probably amount to around 5-6 billion dollars for a slight improvement on what they already have? I doubt it, even if they do have pots of cash to spend.

And others? Brian even suggested VMWare as a potential suitor (and got completely lambasted for it in the responses - entirely unfairly in my opinion). Other names I've heard thrown into the hat are Symantec, IBM, Cisco, Google, Oracle and just about anyone else that could feasibly afford them.

Honestly? I think Citrix's stock is well down at the moment (just over $22 at the time of writing), as are many companies', so it would certainly be a reasonably good time to launch even a hostile takeover, however it's not the first time it's been down in the 20's and nothing happened the last few times. Perhaps the difference now is that, where Citrix were a delectable little canape a few years ago, they are rapidly becoming quite a mouthful these days. Their relentless attempts to establish themselves as an infrastructure player (alongside some of those names mentioned above) and an industry standard in application delivery and virtualisation has been quite a ride for us distributors. For this reason, I don't think they are anywhere near the finished article yet and I can't see a glaringly obvious candidate out there at the moment for whom they would provide a fully rounded, market-beating solution, even in an "embellishment" role. Not yet anyway.

Apparently, the next step on this journey is the "Cloud" - otherwise known as the Internet. (How on earth did we manage to re-brand the humble T'interweb and turn it into a new market area by the way?) Both VMWare and Citrix announced some cloudy stuff at VMWorld and I need to get my head around it before I blog with any authority on it, but I will say this. Mention applications and data in the same sentence as the word Internet to most security people and they will shudder. Never heard of TK Maxx, Marks & Spencer, British Military, [enter your favourite household name]?

On a somewhat more personal note...

There comes a time in most men's lives when they must kiss a fond farewell to youth, freedom and singleton-ism (if that's even a word) and devote their undivided attention to the future mother of their children. That time has now, happily, arrived for the otherwise completely devoted creator of this blog. It is with perhaps a touch of excited nervosity, but yet every confidence, that, at about 1:00pm on Friday 19th September 2008, I will be standing by the altar of the Catholic church in Newmarket, about to turn round and watch my esteemed marketing colleague at COMPUTERLINKS, Maria Curley, walking up the aisle, preparing to admit she wants to spend the rest of her life with me.

I honestly couldn't be a happier chappy but, ultimately, something must give. Blogs and new wives just don't mix, so the blog will just have to get used to life with its master as a married man and take a break for a couple of weeks.

I shall resume my ramblings upon my return when, I happen to know, there will most certainly be one or two things to discuss. (It's VMWorld next week, don't forget, and I can safely say now that Citrix may well out-manoeuvre VMWare on the announcement front once again - the first time being the XenSource acquisition the day before VMWare's IPO. Sorry, but I am not permitted say any more than that at this stage.)

Until then, I bid thee goodbye. I promise to think of you all, suffering the early UK winter, whilst I contemplate whether to take a 6 or a 7 iron on the first par 3 of the Old Course at Vilamoura.

My tips for a wife? Find someone who organises events for a living and has previously been called The Incredible Sleeping Woman whilst on holiday. You need do next to nothing for the wedding and you get to play golf on your honeymoon while she sleeps. That, my friends, is the perfect wife!

Adios amigos.

Green IT not a spin-led "greenwash"

Again, just like the "Virtualisation - a bit of a snapshot" article below, this piece was written a while ago for a broader audience than this blog typically addresses, but I would like to post it nonetheless.

Whilst doubters remain, cynically citing vendor marketing spin, concerning the real impact that such things as virtualisation have on energy consumption and carbon footprints, companies such as Citrix do in fact provide undeniable and measurable improvements.

Getting fewer servers to do the same job, using XenServer for example, is the fundament. Other products though, particularly within the Citrix portfolio, such as XenApp Platinum or Citrix Online, enable secure remote access and fuel-saving work-from-home environments and these also contribute substantially.

As most IT managers are now aware, server virtualisation vastly reduces the amount of servers required to service the environment. This impacts not only energy consumption in powering the actual devices, but also the considerable air conditioning required to keep the data-centres at optimum temperature.

Citrix incorporate a product called Provisioning Server into the Platinum version of their XenServer solution. Taking things to the extreme, this could provide another stepping stone towards the Holy Grail of using energy only when that energy is actually required. Instead of having a fully functional data-centre running all day and all night, regardless of whether it's actually in use or not, Provisioning Server, in tandem with one or two other solutions, provides the capability to fire up servers and take them down again according to time of day and the usage requirements of the organisation.

In an ideal world, an administrator could effectively dismantle the data-centre, or reduce it down to a bare minimum, at 10pm and then start it all back up again at 6am the next morning. This could involve the servers running the same workloads as the previous day or indeed completely different ones. Provisioning Server transforms a server from an SAP server, say, into a Navision server, in just a few minutes. The workloads are stored on virtual disks at the back-end and streamed out to the hardware as and when required.

Taking this one step further, Citrix EdgeSight provides metrics around the end user experience and another complementary vendor, RES Software, manages hardware remotely. So, rather than performing these tasks manually, the administrator could set up rules according to the metrics being delivered back from the EdgeSight Server and then configure RES Wisdom to shut down the servers in the evening when demand goes below a certain point. The next morning, when demand begins to grow again, RES wakes up the machines and Provisioning Server churns out the workloads. Again, demand could also determine what type of server each turns out to be.

These products will undoubtedly integrate closely with one another to enable something approaching a 100% dynamic, on-demand data-centre. Citrix’s soon-to-be-released Workflow Studio will then add a further piece to the pie, providing a simple graphical interface for these processes to be simply and quickly put into place. Throw in remote infrastructure management solutions such as Avocent and you create a remarkably flexible, energy-efficient data-centre.

Moving to the desktop, when you consider a PC uses around 75 watts of power and a WYSE thin client requires about 10 or 15% of that, CFOs will surely demand increasingly sound justification from their CTOs for not choosing the “server-based computing” or application delivery methods over traditional user scenarios.

More dedicated device management also comes into the frame – not only in the data-centre but also on the desktop. RES Software, for example, can enforce a power-down of PCs left on overnight. For a company with 150 employees leaving just 15% of the PCs running overnight, the total cost of the software is offset by the energy savings in just 9 months. Such is the effect of high energy prices, the software pays for itself in under a year on that one functionality alone.

IT departments are now becoming cost centres with their own profit & loss accounts, making energy reduction IT’s problem. Reed Managed Services are Citrix’s flagship case study for green IT and energy usage reduction. Admittedly other non IT-related measures were also implemented, but with 64-bit Citrix virtualisation solutions (and rolling out thin clients to almost all their users), Reed: a) got 100 users on a blade instead of 29, b) made their company 100% carbon neutral, c) saved 26% of their IT budget and d) won them a Green Oscar.

Not bad for vendor marketing spin!

The future of the IT industry

Thanks to the market-shaping friends I keep, I have received (on extremely good authority) some information that I think will be of great interest to you. In the very near future, you will see several ground-breaking mergers and acquisitions in this wonderful, crazy IT world that we work in. Please keep these under your hat for now, as I'm pretty sure they are supposed to remain absolutely confidential for the time being, but, just so that I can say: "You heard it here first", here they are:

Kensington will acquire Ipswitch and re-brand as Chelsea Tractor Boys.
Apple will merge with Blackberry and re-brand as Crumble.
Blue Coat will merge with Red Hat and re-brand as Purple Haze.
Gordon Ramsay Enterprises are looking to add Sage and Juniper to the mix.
Extreme Networks, Leostream and Tumbleweed will form a major joint venture, possibly to be re-branded as Exstream Weed.
Riverbed will flow into Seagate (groan).
Computer Associates will buy the boxer shorts division of Calvin Klein, re-branding as CACK.
Adder and Brother will become one and target the lucrative adoption market.
And finally, I have heard that Expand and Palm are approaching the climax of their negotiations with Siemens.

If you happen to get wind of any more interesting developments on the grapevine, feel free to add them.

Virtualisation - a bit of a snapshot

Note: I wrote this for our company's newsletter, so a very broad audience. It may be somewhat low-level for the hardcore amongst you but I'll post it anyway.

Currently one of the hottest topics in the IT marketplace, virtualisation has opened up new and exciting avenues of expertise (and, ultimately, revenue) for the entire IT channel. Many billions of dollars have been pocketed by the likes of VMWare, Citrix, Microsoft and many others off the back of a) something incredibly simple if we're being honest with ourselves and b) something incredibly old (in IT years that is). Virtualisation, as a term, has come to mean many different things these days, but, for the purposes of this article, I am talking about server virtualisation.

Virtualisation is hardly revolutionary, even if it still seems fresh and shiny to a lot of us. You wouldn't manufacture a carriage for each and every person wanting to travel on a train, you wouldn't provide a drawer for each and every piece of cutlery you wanted to store and you wouldn't send an articulated lorry from London to Inverness with one box on it. So why does it appear to have taken so long for these principles to be applied to servers? Whose idea was it to dedicate a whole server to one single application anyway, when that server should supposedly be capable of "changing the way you do business" or whatever the latest vendor marketing catchphrase happens to be?

Well, IT vendors have been their own worst enemies, to a point. Software having been as infuriatingly unreliable as it is useful, administrators found out many years ago to their cost, that the more you ask a server to do, the more likely it is to fail in one or more of those tasks. Install just one application per server and you give it a fighting chance.

Unlike that piece of cutlery, whose single and only function in this world is to reduce the size of your steak and chips to the point you can eat it with some semblance of manners, software has a thousand and one things to do, on top of delivering your users the information they want from that application. Added to that, unlike software applications, a fork doesn't have to deal with millions of people all over the world thinking up increasingly ingenious ways to kill it. So, in essence, the more you cut down on what a server is expected to provide, the higher the likelihood it'll provide it.

I am being overly simplistic here, of course. But my point is that, despite the fact virtualisation solutions were invented a long time ago, up until the last few years, there were two main reasons they never really took off.

Firstly, software applications and operating systems weren't technically capable of ignoring their neighbours on a server; each application was like a spoilt child. It wanted all the hardware resources to itself and if anything else tried to butt in, it complained bitterly, then sulked, then went home and took its football with it.

Secondly, tin got cheaper. So cheap, in fact, that it didn't really make a lot of difference whether you had racks and racks of servers doing very little. Tin is still cheap today, perhaps as cheap as it will ever be, but the big differences now are that organisations are coming under increased pressure to reduce waste and run their departments in a more responsible, ecological fashion and, of course, in the last couple of years, the costs of running that cheap tin have sky-rocketed.

The development of the modern hypervisor and improvements in general software architecture changed some of this. Although IBM developed virtualisation technology back in the 1960s, long before VMWare brought out their ESX product, it is widely accepted that VMWare were the founders of modern virtualisation techniques. The ESX hypervisor effectively stood as a sort of strict parent in the midst of those spoilt children, making sure none of them got too obnoxious. The hypervisor sat between the mechanics of a server and the software running on it, in this case an operating system, dishing out commands back and forth between the two entities.

Then, along came Professor Ian Pratt from Cambridge University and his open source Xen project. They decided to make a hypervisor the way they would have done all along if anybody had actually thought about it properly. Rather than dishing out these commands yourself (emulation), why not get the component parts to talk to each other directly (paravirtualisation)? The chipset knows it's being virtualised and the operating systems are also aware. Everything runs quicker and is more stable. In fact, this solution was so successful, not only did Citrix agree to shell out 500 million dollars for the project's commercial arm in 2007 but Microsoft, late to the party, also went down this route with their Hyper-V product.

Software vendors are also starting to play their part. Making applications act less like spoilt children was actually their duty, but, increasingly now, they are also adapting them to better suit virtualised environments. Add in the soaring costs of electricity and a general malaise in the global economy (I refuse to succumb to sensationalism and mention the R word), IT Directors now owe it to themselves and their businesses to look at virtualisation, simply as a cost-saving mechanism, irrespective of the IT management advantages it offers.

Companies such as Citrix (who, arguably, have been "virtualising" applications with their Presentation Server product, now XenApp, for over 15 years) are taking the fundament that is server virtualisation and building on it - to great effect. Citrix call it the Dynamic Data Centre. By this, they mean adapting what is currently little more than a static data repository into a constantly-changing, ever-flexible delivery hub for information and data.

Instead of server farms running all day and all night, requiring irritating downtime (albeit scheduled) when maintenance needs carrying out plus always running the same workload (i.e. applications), Citrix products enable those servers to be put into production as and when required - and, if you so wish, with a different workload on them each time. Automating all of this according to usage metrics and applying the same principles to the desktop, as well as the data centre, are the next exciting steps on a journey that started almost 50 years ago but is only now becoming a reality.

I love Citrix! Woohoo!

I have been royally slated today for supposedly biting the hand that feeds me. Please can I therefore have it be known, officially, that my livelihood has been built on Citrix products and that I have stayed loyal to Citrix, despite temptation, for very good reasons. I love Citrix products and I think they're world-beaters but I am also entitled to an opinion on what I think is right and wrong. Some keep their opinions to themselves, others write blogs. Citrix have set high standards for themselves and expect an enormous amount of commitment, accuracy and investment from their distributors. They get it from us in spades, but if I think something needs highlighting, I will highlight it - good or bad.

I try to see things from a customer's point of view, despite the fact my salary is generated by Citrix sales. At the same time, I like to remain as independent as I can because I don't believe that people would read my blog and take it seriously, bearing in mind my position, if all I could find to bang on about was how good Citrix is. Dan Shappir from Ericom got roasted on Brian Madden's website for pretending to offer sound technical advice to questions arising, but in fact surreptitiously pushing his company's products by doing it. People saw through it, got sick of him and "asked" him to stop posting.

For those that think I do nothing but whinge, I have 2 major articles I am waiting to publish on here that extol Citrix to the hilt, I am just waiting for them to be released in their appropriate channels first. Apparently if I publish them here, they no longer remain exclusive and some of the press demand exclusivity.

I have worked with Citrix for about 4-5 years now and I have done nothing but help take their products to market in the best way I can, so see no reason to have to justify myself because I happen to have a critical and investigative manner.

Petulant little outburst over.

Microsoft finally gets real

Up until recently (I personally had no idea this was the case and I wonder how many people actually did), Microsoft did not officially permit you to move VMs (Virtual Machines) running 41 of their products around willy-nilly.

Once you had installed certain MS apps on Server X but wanted to use XenMotion or V-Motion etc. to then move them to Server Y, you weren't officially allowed to do this until 90 days from installation had passed. If you wanted to move it sooner than 90 days after installation, technically, you had to license that app on each piece of tin you wanted it to run on. All this in spite of the fact that you weren't actually doubling up on sessions, you were simply removing it from one box and putting it on another. Common sense appears to have now prevailed and, thankfully, this has now been relaxed.

But what business is it of Microsoft where I install their software anyway? If I have bought a license to use their software, I'll install it wherever I like thanks.

Zane Adam, senior director of integrated virtualization [sic] in the Server and Tools Business at Microsoft: "Businesses are taking steps to make their IT operations more dynamic and are delving into virtualization as a cornerstone strategy. Microsoft recognizes this and is innovating its licensing policies, product support and a wide range of IT solutions to help customers get virtual now."

Gee, thanks Zane.

Citrix rings the changes

In the past few weeks, Citrix has announced several product upgrades and other bits of news but I have been in hibernation for a while and have neglected to keep you informed. For this I apologise. Writers block methinks. That and a valiant, but ultimately fruitless, attempt to improve my golf.

Below is an update of the main announcements with a few pointers as to what they entail (where possible).

XenApp version 5.0 (Sept. 10th)
As you are probably already aware, the name Presentation Server was changed a while back to XenApp. September 10th will see the release of version 5.0 of this now 19 year old Grand Dame, the backbone of the whole Citrix portfolio. Essentially, it still does the same as it did in the old Winframe days which just goes to show that legends never die. The improvements this time around are as follows:

- Runs on Windows Server 2008. (Now, in my opinion, for a company like Citrix, who are supposed to be best mates with Microsoft and are one of the few to have source code level access, a release date for a W2K8-compatible edition of their main product of almost 7 months (!) after the MS release is nothing short of a shambles. What on earth have they been doing?! I am told (but can't confirm) that a Citrix competitor, Ericom, had a W2K8-compatible edition long before Microsoft even released 2008.)

- Opens applications 10 times faster than version 4.5.

- Tighter integration with XenDesktop and XenServer.

- Easier prioritisation of specific applications and users.

Quite why this has been pushed out as a .5 version release is beyond me. The only main difference to 4.5 appears to be compatibility with Server 2008, which I don't think really justifies a .5 version release, 4.6 would have sufficed. Justification for Subscription Advantage holders perhaps? Alignment with other product versions? The latter is more likely.

Provisioning Server for Desktops and Datacenters (sic) version 5.0
No details on what exactly is new.

Password Manager version 4.6 with Service Pack 1
- W2K8 support for console, agent and service
- Vista support for agent
- Usability enhancements (templates, terminology etc.)

EdgeSight for XenApp & Endpoints version 5.0
No details on what exactly is new.

NetScaler 8.1 (July 08)
Minor release

Branch Repeater (May 08)
Branch office box based on WANScaler and Microsoft ISA server.

New Support Offerings (effective immediately)
- New Preferred Plus Platinum option offers a 24x7 support contract with 75 incidents, 2 education passes for XenApp and a week long infrastructure assessment with 2 consultants for $89,000 (!).
- New 24x7 option specifically for XenServer.
- Price to add on additional contact person slashed from $1,500 to $500 per contact.

XenServer "Orlando" release
Probably the most interesting piece of news, in terms of added functionalities, is that of the XenServer "Orlando" project. According to Bridget Botelho, who interviewed Simon Crosby recently (the Citrix XenServer CTO), there are about 100 improvements, enhancements and new features coming in the new version - which I hear might now be 5.0 rather than 4.2. This would make sense bearing in mind my XenApp version alignment comment above and 100 new features would surely justify it!

Absolutely integral to XenServer's long-term success is High Availability. Customers have been screaming for it, indignantly pointing out VMWare's automated re-start capability for servers that crash. Despite this NOT, I repeat NOT, being true HA, VMWare's salespeople have managed to brainwash many of their customers into thinking it is. Nevertheless, XenServer will have this in the next version. The only truly fault tolerant HA solution would involve a 3rd party such as Marathon, Double-Take, Neverfail or SteelEye and Citrix have got extremely cosy with Marathon of late. No further comments on that for now but I feel there may be some space that needs watching...

Still nothing new on the Symantec front though. Just before the acquisition, XenSource scoped up an OEM agreement, to integrate with what used to be Veritas. Since the Citrix take-over, nothing further has happened. Perhaps this is one of the reasons.

Price increases
Citrix are increasing their product pricing in EMEA by about 10% across the board, effective September 1st. Subscription Advantage prices are unaffected for now but will be hit with a similar increase on 1st January 2009. This is apparently in response to the weak dollar and the costs of doing business internationally. In an ironic twist, the announcement coincided with a huge drop in the pound from 1.98 to 1.83 against the dollar (which, I don't mind admitting, has left distributors reeling from having to honour outstanding pricing based on the 1.98 dollar rate). I also read a quote somewhere from a Citrix spokeswoman (unfortunately I can't find it any longer) who claimed there had been no price increases for a long time and their hand was pretty much forced. So what was this then?

Being in a privileged position, I can't tell you everything I know about the roadmap but suffice to say there are a couple of other interesting things on the horizon. The above covers what I believe I can publish without getting into too much trouble. And I shall get my act together and update this blog more often from now on. Slacker.

Barclays banks on COMPUTERLINKS

The takeover bid by Barclays Private Equity of my employer COMPUTERLINKS went through successfully today. They secured 84% of the COMPUTERLINKS shares. I wrote about how I felt about it back in June.

Green IT article

I have had to remove the Green IT piece for now because it will soon be released to the press by our PR agency as a new article, but I'll put it back on again in a couple of weeks once (or if) it has been published. Sorry about that.

Move over British Gas, Citrix are coming!

In another shock move for most of us (except people in the UK, who are now well used to price increases and are currently trying to get their heads around how the hell British Gas can justify a 35% hike the day before Centrica, their parent company, announced having made 1 billion pounds profit), Citrix have decided to increase their prices on all product lines in EMEA, effective 1st September. We've got another few months' grace on Subscription Advantage but they will also increase from 1st Jan next year.

Get your Citrix orders in before September guys!

Citrix hand Ingram Micro their US revenues on a plate

Citrix took the unusual step this week of canning 3 of their 4 distributors in the US. Only Ingram Micro remain and they will now be processing Citrix orders from all of the 1,900 partners in the States. Apparently 75-80% of the Citrix business in America goes through the channel and the US does (I think) around half of the total number for Citrix globally. Now I only got a C in GCSE maths but, by my reckoning, that equates to around about half a billion dollars going through one single distributor!

I can't for the life of me fathom out why Citrix would want to do this. For two main reasons.

Firstly, there are, oddly enough, one or two resellers around who don't actually want to be forced to buy from just one distributor. Credit is always an issue for the smaller resellers and, even for the bigger organisations for whom credit is not a hurdle, resellers want to know they are getting a good deal. Monopolies are never good for customers and if Ingrams can pretty much charge whatever they want, resellers may lose confidence very quickly. It also allows for unfair sales situations where, for example, the disti can supply a favoured partner with lower pricing than another, and neither does it allow a reseller to price-check an item. (Note: I am writing very much on behalf of the resellers - as a disti myself, the latter situation has led to as much pain as it has joy over the years!)

The second reason is VMWare. A battle royal has long since commenced, both in the server virtualisation arena as well as the desktop. The last thing Citrix need to do at this stage is jeopardise this by losing resellers, regardless of how few that may turn out to be. If a reseller doesn't like Citrix's decision but has already invested in this area of technology, which product do you think are they now going to push?

Wake up Citrix - you are now in a C.O.M.P.E.T.I.T.I.V.E. market, your own monopoly days are long gone!

Having said all that, Ingram Micro must be chuckling all the way to the bank about now. At a (probably rather conservative) average of 5% profit for the disti, they would have pocketed approximately $25 million on last year's figures. Twenty. Five. Million. Dollars. Margin. On one (quite small) vendor.

I am assured it won't happen in this country. I have a really good relationship with the guys over at Ingram who were taken on last year to push sales of Access Essentials (we don't sell it so there is no overlap with what Ingram do), but I may well now be extra, extra nice to them just in case it does!

Buy your Riverbed, F5 and Expand shares now!

I've noticed that the point products in the Application Delivery Controller (ADC) market are rapidly being snapped up, typically by vendors who a) do a whole lot more than just accelerating traffic and b) see ADC as just a small, but critical, part of what they do (or, more accurately, should be doing).

As I see it:

1) Applications, file transfer protocols and web traffic are demanding more and more bandwidth.
2) The Internet backbones aren't quite keeping pace just yet, particularly in developing nations.
3) Latency will always be a problem.

For these reasons, WAN acceleration solutions and ADCs are increasing in importance to CTOs. Not necessarily so much as a single project perhaps (although these do still happen of course), but more as a kind of "tick in the box" type request. Enterprise-sized organisations are incorporating these requirements into larger projects and so the main IT vendors that are being expected to provide the solutions for those larger projects feel compelled into having an offering in this space.

The proof is in the pudding:

Juniper buys Peribit in 2005
Cisco buys Fineground in 2005
Citrix buys NetScaler in 2005
Citrix buys Orbital Data in 2006
Blue Coat buys Packeteer in 2008
Brocade buys Foundry Networks in 2008

I don't claim this is an exhaustive list, I'm sure there are others I've forgotten, but all of these acquirers had one thing in common: they all came from different backgrounds but obviously felt the need to back up their core product lines with some sort of WAN acceleration technology.

Which leads us to the tantalising question. Who's next?

By taking a glimpse at the Gartner Magic Quadrant for this area of technology, it doesn't really take a rocket scientist to work out who candidate number 1 might be. Riverbed sticks out like a sore thumb. It concentrates on WAN acceleration and nothing else, it's the market leader by quite some margin and, for the reasons mentioned above, there must be several pairs of lips being well and truly licked at the moment. Talk about primed to be plucked.

Who else? Well, my money's on Expand and F5. Expand is in a similar situation to Riverbed but would be a lot cheaper. F5 have a very sound and complete product portfolio, an exceptionally loyal channel and some very, very good technology indeed. Perhaps VMWare might be a candidate to buy them? VMWare have pots of cash, I don't expect F5 would set them back too ridiculous an amount and it would really annoy Citrix!

Citrix announce Q2 08 results

Citrix released financial results for the second quarter of this year yesterday. I couldn't listen in to the call myself but a contact of mine did and he has given me permission to publicise his synopsis of what was said. Unfortunately I can't name him in person due to compliance issues surrounding his role but I'm sure he will accept my thanks in absentia for the below. (I am going to a wedding in Germany tomorrow so don't have the time to add my own comments today but will do so next week some time.)

Europe was by far the strongest region for the company, and grew revenue 22% versus the year-ago quarter, which outpaced the total 17% growth.

The company did see signs of a weaker economy in Asia Pacific with deals slipping out of the quarter and the same held true for the US.

One of the more important discussions that would relate to your geography is the high likelihood for price increases in Europe to offset the foreign exchange fluctuations. Management didn't provide a whole lot of detail regarding local pricing initiatives, but said details will likely be announced before the end of the quarter. I would be curious to see if this information would help close deals in the pipeline sooner, or push them out indefinitely...

The company's Application Virtualization group was up 7% year-over-year, but there was a slight decline in license revenue offset by solid renewals in subscription advantage contracts. Platinum continued to sell well and was 30% of total Application Virtualization license revenue for the quarter. Sales pipelines were said to be running at unprecedented levels, and they saw a record number of million-dollar deals in the quarter. Going forward the company expects XenApp license growth to be flat for the second-half of the year, which I think is a reflection of a cautious spending environment and also difficult year-over-year comparisons that were driven by price increases in Q2 of 2007. This was previously a segment that management thought would be growing in mid-to-high single digits.

Expectations for XenServer were cut in half. Management reduced expectations from $50M to $25M in 2008 saying that a slower ramp from OEM distribution and slowing economy forced their hand. In 2009, they expect revenues to at least double, so probably around $50M. Management sounded encouraged about the future opportunity, saying that of the 3,100 authorized XenServer partners, 500 contributed to deals in the quarter. They signed 800 new customers, but the majority are still in pilot mode from the sound of it. In Q3, they will be delivering the next release of XenServer focused around 4 key upgrades: 1) high availability; 2) disaster recovery; 3) P to V migration tools; and 4) XenCenter for configuration management.

XenDesktop has had a fairly successful launch - Citrix had 10,000 downloads in the first 30 days, and they already have 2 customers with more than 1,000 seats each. Sounds like many of the beta customers have committed to going live in the second-half.

Application Networking was a huge surprise as it beat expectations across the board. The new NetScaler MPX box accounted for just over 10% of the products shipped, and Enterprise (versus internets) were the biggest buyer. The company also signed a big deal for WANScaler worth over $5 million which helped the division out tremendously.

XenServer in a box. Literally.

One of our partners, 360is, are probably the foremost XenServer reseller in the UK at the moment. They are certainly the most pro-active and are leading the way in terms of advocating the product over VMWare throughout the end user community, not without success either, I hasten to add. The deserve their success too; they understand it better than anyone and have put a lot of time and effort into the product, both when it was XenSource and since the Citrix acquisition too.

(Now you may think I'm a bit stupid advertising our best partner to all and sundry, but the reality is, my lovely competitors are already constantly on the phone, offering them the world on a plate, so 360is are unfortunately far from the hidden gems they used to be. Still, we've only got Citrix to thank for that I guess...)

Anyway, I went to an event that they held yesterday which I found very interesting. Rob, the MD, asked the audience how many of them were using virtualisation and I don't think there was anyone there who wasn't. Bearing in mind that when the same question was asked of audiences 2 years ago, and the number of hands represented only about 10%, that's not bad. How prevalent virtualisation is within their data centres is another matter entirely, but the virtualisation message is undeniably filtering through to smaller companies now, as well as the large enterprises.

The most interesting thing for me, though, was their self-designed hardware device, specifically created to run XenServer. This is a 2U box that is kitted out with a motherboard you'd typically find in a mid-range system, a beefy amount of RAM (128 GB) and 16 core CPUs, but no on-board storage or disks. They include loads of free services such as installation and next business day on-site support and if, like one of their customers was, you were considering buying new hardware (from the usual well-known brands) specifically to implement a virtualised environment, you'd probably want to check this out first in my opinion. According to 360is' figures, you can save an awful lot of money.

I thought of it as a thin client for the data-centre, just with one big exception. Instead of a thin client costing about the same as a PC and not working nearly as well, this thing'll cost you less than a standard server and will actually do the job better!

Citrix vs. VMware vs. Qumranet

I don't expect for one moment that the people who read my blog (and, by the way, we have now reached the monumental landmark of over 200 unique visitors and 600 page views, which I am incredibly pleased with considering I've only been doing it 2 months, so thanks very much for visiting!) are not also loyal devotees to Brian Madden's website but just in case there are one or two unaware of Brian's work, I thought I'd bring this to your attention.

There is an Israeli company called Qumranet who have a remote display protocol called Spice. Brian regards this as being "one of the most amazing things I've seen in this industry in a long time". The remote display protocol (Citrix = ICA, Microsoft = RDP which is also used by VMware) is one of the most critical components of a good user experience in Virtual Destop environments, but possibly yet more important is the hypervisor that the whole thing runs on. Qumranet uses KVM as its hypervisor, Citrix and VMWare obviously use their own. So Brian and his pal Gabe Knuth are going to do a bake-off.

I love bake-offs and, in my opinion, vendors are far too reticent about participating in them. If you're confident about your technology being as good as you keep telling us it is, go ahead and prove it...! Anyway, this one will stack Qumranet's "Solid ICE" VDI product up against Citrix XenDesktop (using XenServer as the VDI host) and VMware's VDI solution.

As Brian freely admits, this test will be paid for by Qumranet but anyone who has met Brian would not doubt his technical independence and integrity, regardless of financial compensation. So, to avoid any complaints once the results are released, he wants your input on how you think the tests should be designed and carried out. Feel free to offer your 2 cents' worth here.

I, personally, cannot wait for the results. I would like to make an educated prediction at the winner but I am not really technically capable enough. So I'll hazard a not-very-educated guess, bearing in mind the hypervisor is being tested and not the protocol, so in other words weight and origin of hypervisor, basic virtualisation technique and amount of VMs on a machine will probably have more significant effects than just remoting capability:

1. Citrix
2. Qumranet
3. VMWare

We did a bake-off here at COMPUTERLINKS recently with ADCs (Application Delivery Controllers). We tested Juniper, F5, Packeteer, Blue Coat and Citrix. Don't tell anyone but Citrix WANScaler actually came out the best - and by quite some margin too. But then, I would say that, wouldn't I?

Poll voting sensation

I have uncovered some grossly underhand tactics by mischievous colleagues of mine to deliberately tamper with and manufacture results of my recent poll entitled "What do you think of my blog?" so I have reluctantly removed it. A free and fair voting procedure is an important part of the democracy we enjoy and concerted efforts to falsify results is not something that can be tolerated. Just ask the BBC. All complaints concerning the removal of this poll should be forwarded to Jamie Garner at COMPUTERLINKS.

And the next time I pose that question, I won't be so stupid as to offer "You're an idiot" as an answer :-)

Hyper-V release

After about 3 years of coding and development (a lot of which was, by all accounts, carried out by XenSource before the acquisition by Citrix), Microsoft have finally released Hyper-V, their long-awaited hypervisor and management system. I haven't seen it myself, and wouldn't actually know what to do with it if I had, so I'll just concentrate on the commercial impacts I believe this will have.

According to reports I have read and people I have spoken to though, the first version of this product isn't exactly up to much with regard to features and functionality. But then it doesn't really need to be. It will be baked into Windows Server 2008 and will be essentially free so it's unlikely to ever really set the world alight. Having said that, I'm sure it'll be good enough to do the basics of virtualisation and thereby you will be able to enjoy the benefits you get from this process - consolidation of servers, more dynamic data-centres, reduced need for power, cooling, space etc. - by using Microsoft products instead of a competitor's. This was actually, in my opinion, always one of the main drivers behind Hyper-V. Doing VMWare some serious damage. More on that in a second.

So, alongside hurting the dastardly VMWare (who have successfully managed to really rub the guys at Redmond up the wrong way), why have Microsoft gone down this route? How are they going to make any extra money from it? Internal discussions with Dominic and David here at COMPUTERLINKS led us to 3 main reasons for doing it:

1) The hypervisor itself will cost $28. Times that by the amount of server licenses Microsoft sell and that's not a bad start, particularly as the Hyper-V edition of Windows Server 2008 will be the default. But I'm sure Microsoft are expecting improved revenues of the management suites around it too. Things like SMS, MOM, Virtual Machine System Centre and other management tools as well as the advancements around VECD (Vista Enterprise Centralised Desktop or virtual desktops), which ideally need a virtualised datacentre to function properly, will also add incremental business in no small fashion.

2) The world is moving that way anyway. Let's not forget, Microsoft are way behind the curve on this. They failed to move early enough on the wave of virtualisation, allowed VMWare to build up a substantial lead and are desperately trying to catch up now. The business reasons for virtualisation and dynamic datacentres are robust enough for this to take off in a big way and Microsoft simply can't get up amongst the leaders early enough.

3) I saw a documentary on Bill Gates a couple of weeks ago where Sir Alan Sugar was also interviewed. He referred to the Microsoft sales guy who came to try and sell him an operating system all those years ago as a "transatlantic smoothie". He also refused to buy MS-DOS for his Amstrad computers until the cost came down so far that it was as good as free. Microsoft (and Gates admitted this freely), were doing nothing but seeding the market. Any income from it was good but the main point was that, if a customer was using Microsoft products, that meant they weren't using a competitor's. Google had a similar approach. Offer your utilities for free for as long as it takes for people to become dependent on them, then bring in the charges - mainly in their case to organisations who want to advertise to those people using your utilities, but also (I'm sure the future will bring this) to those people themselves. Ironically enough, Google, and the whole concept of cloud computing, probably now offer the largest threat to Microsoft's current domination of global IT, but that is a whole new topic for another day.

So where does this leave Citrix then? They have spent the last 13 or 14 years practically selling Terminal Services CALs for Microsoft, spent 500 million dollars last year on a hypervisor and are now in the unenviable position of having to get a return on that investment just as their biggest partner brings out their own competitive solution. (All this "co-opetion" speak no longer floats my boat I'm afraid. It's a competitive product, just as VMWare ESX is.) And the big difference this time around is that Citrix don't have the protection of the TS CAL story to help them out.

Imagine the scenario. You've bought Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V. It doesn't quite do everything VMWare does but you've saved your company many thousands of pounds at the same time and can live without the schnick-schnack. Why would you then decide to buy Citrix to "add value" to your Hyper-V? With Terminal Services it was different - that's mission critical so the proposition that Citrix offered on top of TS was justifiable. Virtualising servers and managing them isn't really mission critical. It may become so in the future but it's not right now. Brian Madden thinks it will take 2 years for VDI to become mainstream and also, interestingly, thinks Citrix will actually ditch XenServer altogether.

I wouldn't perhaps go that far but I also have my doubts. Can this nice, cushy, you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours relationship with Microsoft last much longer?

Postscript 01/07/08: Apologies, I misunderstood Brian Madden in the article he wrote to which I linked above. He is not predicting the end of XenServer, he is predicting the end of Citrix' support for Xen, the open-source hypervisor, as he now clarifies in this article.

Give the bean counters some slack

I found out yesterday that a reseller I know reasonably well went into administration this week. I won't mention their name here as I don't think it's fair to broadcast it any more than is necessary, both legally-speaking and in terms of protecting the owner's dignity. Suffice to say, they were a Citrix partner, although (thankfully) not one of ours, and were heavily involved in the server-based computing/thin client world.

To be perfectly honest, I hadn't really noticed much in the way of a slow-down in the economy or any real tangible signs of a credit crunch yet, but maybe it is more serious than I had originally thought. Of course there are any number of reasons why a company goes bust, it may not necessarily have been the credit crunch. Sometimes I guess it only takes one late payment from an end user to tip things over the edge and the cleaners are called in. However this reseller had been around for a while and I wonder if economic factors did play a role.

Which got me thinking a little bit about the way we regard our accounts departments, otherwise known by many as the "sales prevention departments". In sales, we concentrate solely, as we should, on getting as much business in as possible and, if we had it our way, every deal would go through on 30 days credit. The finance directors and credit control managers of this world, however, are paid to ensure they actually get the money for all these purchase orders and it's fair to say they don't have an easy job. We do all the hard work by getting the deals in and, at the last minute (literally), we are prevented from closing that deal by our own colleagues. They then get it in the neck from both us and the customer.

But do we actually do all the hard work? Who pays our salaries? Is it sales, by getting the deals in, or accounts, by getting the hard cash for those deals in?

When I told our accounts department of the above news, I found the reaction, which was of genuine personal frustration, really interesting. I guess it's a black mark on their book - they authorised the credit for the deal so it's sort of their responsibility when it goes wrong.

I, for one, have suffered some frustration with accounts departments in the past few years but, knowing this particular reseller as well as I do and seeing the pain that the news of the reseller's plight caused our finance team has made me understand their situation much better. We in sales have no idea of company backgrounds and general financial health and, to be honest, it's not our role to care too much about it, as long as they place orders. But somebody does need to care. They're not the evil dark side, they are securing our future, both as a company and as an employee.

I think I will go easier on the bean counters from now on. Well, a bit anyway...

We're getting a new Daddy

As you may have seen in the press over the last couple of days (on Channel EMEA, CRN or Bloomberg amongst others), a company called Platin 274 which is financed by Barclays Private Equity in the background, has made a friendly offer to acquire the COMPUTERLINKS group for €15.50 per share. This values our company at €104 million or approximately 82 million pounds.

I am extremely pleased by this news. With the current rate of consolidation in our industry (Arrow buying DNS, DNS buying Centia, Avnet buying part of Magirus, Avnet potentially buying Horizon and so on), it was only a matter of time before we were snapped up. Our growth has been exceptional over the last few years, especially in such a competitive market where product margins are being reduced at such a rate of knots, and this growth was in no way reflected in our stock market price. For a company that now has a major presence in 17 or 18 countries worldwide and consistently showed contra-market upward development, hovering around 11 or 12 Euros a share was simply not good enough. With a powerful financial partner behind us, I think we can move forward a lot more quickly and dynamically without the pressure of being a listed company and all the inevitable shackles and responsibilities to share-holders that that entails.

The most important thing for me however, is that we weren't acquired by a competitor. Niche players such as us who offer genuine value to the customers who buy from us, as opposed to just shifting boxes out the door, are becoming thin on the ground. I have developed a great affinity to COMPUTERLINKS, they have served me well and I like to think the reverse is also true. So I would definitely not appreciate having to work for another distributor, purely interested in accessing our customer base with no understanding of the company spirit. This has happened to some of our competitors recently and I'm really glad our board found a serious, cash-rich, long-term backer not already associated with the industry.

Finally, I also think Barclays have uncovered an absolute bargain. 82 million pounds, bearing in mind other recent technology acquisitions, is a steal in my opinion. 82 million would have got you almost exactly a third of XenSource, a company with a turnover, if the grapevine is to be believed, of 5 million dollars. Maybe that's not quite apples and apples but I wouldn't be surprised if Barclays look to sell COMPUTERLINKS in a few years time for an awful lot more than 104 million Euro. Let's hope staff get share options then...

Citrix iForum - part 5

And finally... Green IT.

I've heard a lot of people banging on about Green IT in the last year or so and, in actual fact, I personally am responsible for some of that banging. I have always thought that virtualisation, as a concept, is fantastic in itself in lowering carbon emissions by reducing power consumption and so on but I must admit I had never considered the impact to be that huge. That was until I saw the Green IT speech by Reed Managed Services.

They reckon they are the largest 64-bit Citrix user in the UK and have recently won a "Green Oscar", whatever that is. Instead of what used to be 29 users on average on a blade, they can now get up to 100.

Add in a whole host of WYSE terminals, which use 12 watts of power instead of 75 with a PC, and a virtualised server infrastructure using VMWare (only because XenServer wasn't around 2 years ago of course) and Reed not only made their company completely carbon-neutral but saved 26% of their IT budget in the process. Which I thought was pretty impressive.

The speaker also suggested many other ways that IT manufacturers can further reduce carbon footprints such as using smaller packaging, implementing fewer delivery drops into the shipping process, providing 100% recyclable packaging and removing instruction manuals completely and just putting them online instead. Apparently it's possible to get 99% of packaging to be recyclable currently. The other 1% is the bubble wrap. One bright spark in the audience suggested we put CO2 in the bubbles, which I thought was quite amusing.

I think I'll bang on about Green IT a bit more now.