Simon Bramfitt

Rebooting the blog

After a three-month hiatus I'm back to writing again.

I had to set my blog aside back in May to comply with Gartner's policy on analyst blogging. I was hoping to continue writing on the Gartner blog site, but I never quite managed to find a way to express myself in a way that I was comfortable while at the same time complying with Gartner's blogging policies (which at the time that Gartner bought Burton Group could easily be paraphrased as reading "if you want to blog you're more than welcome to, just don't expect to be able to say much that anyone would want to listen to"). 

Moving on to today: I'm no longer with Gartner, which if nothing else means that I get to choose what I write.  Having said that, I'm not yet free to write about anything I choose. Gartner has taken pains to remind me of my "post-employment obligations" which require me not to discuss anything that has been shared with me since the beginning of the year. This isn’t really that big of a deal, even if Gartner did not have any expectations here, sharing information provided in confidence is not something I would do anyway.  Besides, desktop virtualization is an astonishingly fast moving field. So much so that any information that has been shared with me under NDA will more than likely be public knowledge in months if not weeks, and at that point I'll be more than happy to express my opinions. 

Citrix Synergy comes to San Francisco

I'm rather looking forward to Synergy this year; for one thing it's going to be in my own backyard in San Francisco, while I appreciate not having to travel the big draw for me is that this will be when Citrix finally formally launch XenClient. I'll cover my thoughts on XenClient in more detail in my next blog post but for now here is my summary of what to look for to next week.

First off, I need to put in a plug for two events that I'm participating in.

Chris Wolf and I will be presenting the breakout session “SYN 313 - Server-hosted Virtual Desktops: what the vendors aren't telling you”.  This is a follow on to the presentation at last year's Synergy which focused on server virtualization. This time around we will be taking a close look at what we consider to be the critical requirements that a enterprise class server hosted virtual desktop platform should possess and then scoring vendor products against these requirements. SYN 313 is scheduled for 4:30 PM on Wednesday, May 12th.

Then on Thursday at 5 PM I'm participating in a Geek Speak Live! Session alongside Simon Crosby, Ian Pratt, Kurt Roemer, and Gabe Knuth where we will be discussing the client hypervisor. I'm not sure whether I should be looking forward to sitting alongside Simon or not - images of being locked in a cage with a tiger keep flashing through my mind.

Tiger baiting aside, what else is happening at Synergy?

One breakout session that I wanted to attend but can't because it clashes with my own, is Aaron Cockerill’s presentation (SYN324) on Citrix’s vision for the future of XenDesktop (thanks Aaron, I knew I could rely on you).  

One session that I definitely will be attending is Michael Thomason’s session “Making Sense of desktop virtualization - what we learned” (SYN307). Michael is a Senior IT architect for Emory Healthcare, if you attended Synergy 2009 you might remember that it was Emory Healthcare that won the Citrix Innovation Award last year. I hope Michael won’t think badly of me for saying that last year he had only just scraped the surface of what was possible with XenDesktop, and I'm very interested to hear what he has learned over the last 12 months and how Emory's doctors have been getting on with XenDesktop.

I'm tempted by Rosen Sharma's session on optimizing security for VDI deployments (SYN309), but unfortunately his session clashes with the session that Sean Donahue and Orestes Melgarejo are presenting on XenApp futures (SYN306). The key item here for me is not so much learning about the new technologies that might be appearing on the XenApp roadmap, but in finding out what lies behind the cryptic bullet point “Increased integration with Microsoft and the Citrix stack”.

These sessions aside, I think that for the rest of the event you'll either find me at the XenClient sessions or at Geek Speak Live! Ignoring my own participation, Citrix have put together an outstanding lineup of sessions for Geek Speak Live! with topics covering everything from desktop power consumption to cloud security.

For me, the only bad news is that when Synergy winds down, so too will my blog. Gartner like quite a few other analyst firms has strict policies on analyst blogging, so once Synergy is over www.SimonBramfitt.com will be put on hiatus and my blogging activities will transition over to the Gartner blog site. I'll still keep a token presence here, but probably no more than status updates and notifications of new posts on the Gartner site.

The sleeping giant awakes - II

Yesterday's other big news was that Microsoft’s investment in Calista is finally paying off.  Windows Server 2008 R2 SP 1 will see the introduction of Calista technologies. Now renamed RemoteFX, Microsoft has taken Calista and remade it as both a new graphics engine to power RDP and a major incentive for customers to look to Hyper-V for as the foundation for any future desktop virtualization project. 

The sleeping giant awakes - Microsoft gets desktop virtualization right

Yesterday was a huge day for desktop virtualization.  Microsoft shared it's vision for the virtual desktop, corrected its past mistakes, and showed off its bright new future.

 

Right from the start Microsoft showed that it had been listening to its customers’ feedback. As of July 1st Microsoft is rolling Virtual Enterprise Centralized Desktop (VECD) into the Windows Software Assurance (Windows SA) program. This means that anyone with Software Assurance can deploy desktops locally or in the data center at no additional cost. At the same time Microsoft is extending the remote access rights so that remote isn’t tethered to a single PC in the primary users’ home. This awareness of the fact that users want flexibility around when and where they work is the key element that has been missing from Microsoft’s virtualization strategy since day one.

Citrix readying XenClient for launch

I believe that endpoint virtualization is going to be a fundamentally disruptive technology and one that will have a much more profound impact on the way IT organisations deliver services than server virtualization.  So from that perspective one of my biggest frustrations with VMware and Citrix at the moment is lack of detailed information that is being shared about progress withtheir respective client virtualization offerings.  When presented with this type of situation, the only thing to do is to try and read between the lines a little.

I called out Dell last week for labling its new Latitude 13 laptop as being ”Ready for Virtualization” and asked the question does this mean that it will be shipping with a client hypervisor some time soon. Now it's Citrix's turn. In the run up to Summit (Citrix's Partner event) Citrix are running a competition with the top prize being a "XenClient compatible Dell Latitude E6400 ATG Laptop" - Full contest details are at: Citrix Virtual Computing Demo Contest.

As far as I know this is the first time that Citrix has called out a specific device as being XenClient compatible and it makes me wonder just how closely Citrix and Dell have been working to ready products for XenClient's launch, especially when you see who is giving the Day 2 keynote at Synergy this year (Michael Dell if you hadn't already guessed).