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...

When you've got a horse in the race, I guess it's normal to try and sell people on it, but most people with SaaS experience should be yelling loud and clear "Thanks, but no thanks!"

In the niche areas where remote storage/aggregation of data makes sense, then by all means plug SaaS. Tie your salespeople and order fulfillers to the back-end. But there are lots of areas where there is NO SaaS replacement for plain old OS-installed applications--in fact, there are vastly more software uses where there isn't a SaaS option than otherwise.

Citrix? Jesus, I remember that off of the stone age. An expensive workaround for developers too lazy to write applications that work over a WAN or the net. 10 years ago I might have considered Citrix, now, no vendor gets anywhere my network if he so much as dreams about citrix. One recent vendor wanted us to buy their £400K "enterprise" quality application - "it works great in Citrix!". No deal.

Citrix is the dinosaur.

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 ...

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.

"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.

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.