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.

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.

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.

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]?

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.

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!

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

This is how not to do it (thanks to virtualization.info for this):

This morning VMware’s customers that upgraded their virtual data centers with the new Infrastructure 3.5 Update 2 had an awful surprise: any virtual machine that is turned off cannot be powered on again, and any attempt to execute a VMotion (the live migration of a VM from one host to another) fails.

The reason behind this huge and unprecedented issue is an error in the license expiration time.
Full article here

Oops.

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.

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 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!