Citrix Synergy Conference Recap By Brian Ducharme published: Wednesday, May 28 2008
Last week I had the pleasure of attending this year's
re-branded Citrix iForum, now called Citrix Synergy. The event took place in Houston, TX, the main
street of which looked like a scene out of "I Am Legend," with dilapidated
buildings and empty storefronts. Luckily
we were there for the conference, not for sight-seeing.
The conference began on Tuesday with a great opening keynote
by Nicholas Carr , author of "Does IT Matter" and "The Big Switch" who talked
about the similarities between power delivery and desktop delivery. In his vision, delivery innovations mold and
shape the way companies reduce the cost to market. By remaining on the edge of innovation we
continually change our model of doing business.
Next, Mark Templeton, President and CEO of Citrix continued in this vein
by talking about DirectTV and how their method of delivery is closely related
to the model in which Citrix delivers the desktop. A new addition to this delivery model is the
use of Citrix Branch Repeater and Citrix App Receiver.
XenDesktop seemed to be the largest focus for this event,
with XenServer getting hardly a mention other than it being part of the SYNERGY
that is XenDesktop, XenApp, XenServer and NetScaler.
The Keynote ended with a "Bang" as the XenDesktop demo
crashed leaving Templeton unable to show the live demo. After a short break during the keynote, they
fixed the problem and where able to finish the demo. Ending the keynote, was a
"spicy" panel discussion that put Bob Muglia of Microsoft in the hot seat as he
became the center of most of the discussion as panelists brought up the
Microsoft licensing model around virtualization.
After the keynote we had a chance to attend a press
conference with Templeton and Muglia addressing the partnership between Citrix
and Microsoft. The big question of the
day was around why doesn't Microsoft just buy Citrix? The answer from Microsoft was that Citrix
builds upon the foundation that Microsoft creates. Microsoft and Citrix have different models -
Microsoft's strategy is:
- Understand
your customers
- Build
a great product
- Price
it competitively
- Sell a
boat-load of it.
Citrix has a slightly different strategy:
- Understand
your customers
- Provide
a custom-tailored solution
- Price
it a little bit higher
- Focus
on selling it to the customers that need it.
This difference in strategies is what creates such a
symbiotic relationship between the two companies.
The other interesting thing that came out of this press
conference is the admission from Templeton that when Hyper-V is ready it absolutely
will be part of their solution, and may even become the preferred hypervisor for
running Windows-based VMs.
In addition Citrix does not want to be the "pane of glass"
that manages virtual machines in the datacenter; they will use Microsoft System
Center or another 3rd party management software for this.
The second day keynote was more of the same discussion
around "Delivering the Desktop," during which Wes Wasson, Senior VP and Chief
Marketing Officer at Citrix, took the stage to announce Cocamar the winner of
the Citrix Innovation Award. The keynote
contained presentations from HP, Intel, CSC and SAP Labs. The final presentation was from Frank Gens,
Senior VP and Chief Analyst for IDC, with some predictions about the future of
IT environments.
Although I didn't have a lot of time to visit the exhibition
hall, the time that I did spend there was great. I had a chance to see a lot of first-hand
demos of XenDesktop along with a variety of solutions for creating a rich-media
experience to the endpoint. One such
solution is part of a Citrix beta project called Pictor (part of Virtual Design
Studio). This offering delivers high-end OpenGL graphics acceleration,
leveraging a rack-based high-end GPU from NVidia that contains 4-GPUs per rack
unit. This solution is currently
allowing users of Dassault
CATIA v5 to get high-end graphic performance without having a high-end
workstation on their desk. The
technology will support other OpenGL apps, but is currently being tested with CATIA.
Two other companies addressing the problem of end-point
desktop acceleration were ChipPC and Ericom .
ChipPC used an impressive small foot-print thick-client and Ericom used
a new hardware accelerated protocol to achieve a rich desktop environment.
The last company that I had a chance to look at was Neocleus ,
which had a very slick new approach to desktop virtualization. The Neocleus product was a little difficult
to understand and still early in the development, but looks very promising. In short, it takes an existing Windows
installation and then slips in a hypervisor underneath it, automatically
creating a VM of your master installation.
It then uses this master image to make use of the Windows drivers,
allowing them to bypass the virtualized drivers. This gives you great performance, but still
allows the benefits of having multiple VMs for separating your different work
environments.
The conference ended with a very funny performance by Dana
Carvey who repeatedly called Wes Wasson, Wes Waverly...possibly by accident, but
maybe it was on purpose, which would be even funnier! As always it was a great event.
Related Links: Citrix Synergy 08 , Video: Keynotes - Day 1 ,
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