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.