With 2009 now well underway (Happy New Year everyone, I hope your festive periods were relaxing, fruitful and merry, although perhaps not in that order), it's time to look ahead and try and get some idea of where the famously speedy - and often shortlived - IT sector trends will take us this year.
Virtualisation, I think we can all agree, took a giant leap forward last year, with general acceptance, at least on a server level, showing signs of ever-increasing maturity. I can't imagine many of the major companies in the UK not now employing VMWare, Citrix, Microsoft or A.N.Other virtualisation vendor somewhere in their estate, whether in live usage or on test networks. The next step is of course ensuring desktop virtualisation catches on as well as server virtualisation has/is and VMWare and Citrix will no doubt continue their dogfight for a while to come. They both appear to be doing very much the same thing now on the VDI front, which is testament to the strength of their technologies on the one hand, but, on the other, has resulted in a straight drag-race to get the missing components of a real, workable virtual desktop infrastructure out there, tested and into production. By that I mean offline VDI, automisation, storage management and the other issues that experts like Brian Madden would like to see solved before VDI can go mainstream. Exciting stuff but I think nirvana is still some way off.
Obviously the economic environment will have an impact on IT spending but I'm so bored with the doom and gloom stories that help make recessions self-fulfilling prophesies that I refuse to take part in it.
Microsoft released their Windows 7 beta and promptly crashed their own download site after reportedly limiting it to 2.5 million copies. For the whole world. They have now taken away the limit so everyone can get it, but only until 24th January. It is significant that it took Microsoft over 5 years (after XP) to take Vista to market yet Windows 7 has a beta release just 13 months after the Vista release date. Despite Microsoft's pathetic protestations of Vista adoption "en masse", I hardly think we need any further proof that Vista was and is a total flop. Windows 7, however, should achieve what most IT vendors were hoping for months ago, namely the opportunity for customers to completely re-evaluate their IT strategy and refresh the whole kaboodle. For Citrix specifically, being such a dominant, infrastructure-level software, this is manna from heaven. The days of clumsy client-server computing might now, finally, be consigned once and for all to the past, with administrators hopefully replacing it with dynamic data-centres, accelerated web apps, virtualised infrastructures and a work-from-anywhere-with-anything-as-long-as-you're-working kind of approach.
Which brings me on to what I see as the most important trend, certainly within our sector of the market: Cloud Computing or Software as a Service (SaaS). Just to clarify for those unfamiliar with the terms: Cloud Computing involves removing the on-site infrastructure and licenses required to run your applications and purchasing a service from a 3rd party instead. None of the apps are then stored locally on your own premises, they are stored "in the cloud" so to speak, i.e. in the Internet, and provided to you according to your requirements, a bit like gas or electricity. Or even your telephone and, as with your phone, you pay a fixed fee per month or per year and are charged separately for overusage if you exceed your agreed limits.
So you take apps away from the desktop, stick them in a back-end datacentre somewhere and allow users to access them in a secure, controlled manner over the web. Haven't we heard this before somewhere? Citrix have been advocating and selling this style of application delivery very successfully for years with XenApp and its predecessors. So is SaaS complementary to Citrix? In my opinion, no. Not in the slightest. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Cloud Computing is as much of a competitor, long-term, to the Citrix/VMWare virtual infrastructure vision as, say, Google Apps presents to Microsoft Office. Ultimately, they will probably co-exist reasonably happily but I suspect battle has already commenced on a small scale.
I just wonder why you would buy into virtual desktops, put together the necessary infrastructure to run them, then have to support and maintain everything ad infinitum, when you can just pay someone else to do it all for you? And you can choke their throat rather than your own if it goes wrong. I may be wrong here but, with the advent of web front ends for most corporate apps, added to the fact that about 90% of new apps are being developed for the web, SaaS appears to me to be a more logical and cost-effective route to go down, especially outside of the large enterprise space.
Where Citrix and VMWare can get involved, and both have thrown their hats into the ring already, is by helping streamline the infrastructure that the SaaS providers need. Citrix have done this with Citrix Cloud Centre, which is basically NetScaler, WANScaler and XenServer cobbled together. But this has nothing to do with the core business of XenApp and, as I see it, neatly sidesteps XenDesktop almost entirely.
Naturally, a lot of companies are jumping on this bandwaggon and a lot has been written about it. I have found several interesting articles such as Jeremy Geelan listing what he sees as the top 50 companies in this space, Stephen Arnold stating who he thinks is leading the wave and The Register with a usage poll. There are, as with everything, plenty of plus and minus points to Cloud Computing and I will discuss these, as well as going into a bit more detail around the threats and opportunities I see for Citrix, in a separate article in the next few days.
