Citrix boss wants data center 'dinosaurs' to evolve
Service-oriented mammalians to survive IT recession
Posted in Management, 30th April 2008 20:08 GMT
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Interop 2008 Day two of Interop Las Vegas 2008 opened with a modest IT proposal from Mark Templeton, President and CEO of Citrix.
Speaking at his morning keynote, Templeton said it's time for businesses to restructure their entire enterprise computing agenda to suit the needs of today's fashionable service-oriented model.
"We've been in an IT recession since 2001," said Templeton. "We are in a bad spot. Our cost models are out of whack."
Citrix believes financial salvation lies in businesses moving away from the traditional distributed business model, where applications are stored on individual PCs.
"We have a huge problem," said Templeton. "The complexity we have around legacy is weighing us down. It's the biggest problem we have in getting to this service-oriented era. The mainframe guys got stuck in the tar pit like dinosaurs. They did not make the transition to personal computing."
Templeton proposes that data centers transform into delivery centers — where customers and employees receive a SaaS experience like those offered by Salesforce.com or Amazon S3.
His ideal system would work as follows:
- Simple, fast and on-demand experience. "Make it work like the web," said Templeton.
- Device, network and application independence. "There should be a choice of the network and apps I'm using."
- Content security and access control. "And it has to be built-in, not glued on."
- Dynamic capacity: peak and off-peak. "Turn it up, turn it down."
- Predictable operating and capital costs.
"We can look to a company that does all this," said Templeton.
That's usually cue for a self-promotion segment of a keynote, but it turns out his ideal model is the North American direct broadcast satellite company, DirecTV. (Alas, the Citrix commercial landed 10 minutes later.)
DirecTV, according to Templeton, operates how an IT department ideally should. A customer gets a digital receiver and that's pretty much all that's necessary to start streaming their Doctor Who and Joanie Loves Chachi. The customer owns their own television. They can choose the brand and what size of screen they desire, and can hook up anything else to system they want. (El Reg can't verify this experience, as a reporter's salary means lonely nights watching public access television.)
"So why can't our computer work the same way?" asked Templeton. His model translates with the data center acting as a delivery controller, and the computer as the app receiver.
Of course, Templeton also adds some Citrix-made access gateways and branch repeaters to the metaphor — because naturally daddy's gotta eat. ®
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COMMENTS
Today's fashionable service-oriented model
Funny thing is that today's fashionable service-oriented model looks very similar to the service-oriented model that was being used when I first got into the IT field (over 30 years ago). The only difference is that today, the communication between the application and the service is via a Web/Soap interface. Gee, we were even doing B2B services back then.
I agree with an earlier poster, that the mainframe had all these features. And, it can even do Web/Soap too.
dinosaur
"Go to the website, and get an update... a lot can change in a decade ..."
I have, I know my attitude to Citrix is old, but in the recent demos i've seen - including on the XenDesktop kit etc, each time we had app problems, it brought down the app for everyone - and that didnt seem to be the fault of the app. We demoed some kit and we just werent impressed. LIke many orgs, we have a variety of apps in terms of functionality/legacy etc but we're not unusual.
The suggestion from Vendors was to run more servers, with less sessions to minimise the impact of app crashes!! That poor in anyones book. If we sacked half the staff we'd only have half the problems as well!
For what it is, its expensive. I prefer to invest in good traditional client/server architectures.
On paper, XenDesktop looks stunning. I truly hope that one day it works for us.
I like citrix
I don't think it's a relic, citrix is perfect for my network. 60 remote sites 1-2 workstations and 4 remote offices. All login via a web interface. My head office are all on thin terminals. If anything goes wrong all I have to do is look at the servers no need to travel. It's centrally managed which saves my compnay a lot of ££ otherwise we'd need another IT person.
Dude .. Citrix is a company, not a product..
I think Citrix has like forty different things in its portfolio. People who use "Citrix" the way people used to use "Lotus" are the dinosaurs...
Go to the website, and get an update... a lot can change in a decade ...
Sounds Familiar
His ideal system would work as follows:
* Simple, fast and on-demand experience. "Make it work like the web," said Templeton.
* Device, network and application independence. "There should be a choice of the network and apps I'm using."
* Content security and access control. "And it has to be built-in, not glued on."
* Dynamic capacity: peak and off-peak. "Turn it up, turn it down."
* Predictable operating and capital costs.
Sounds like a Mainframe to me...
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