Authored by Andreas van Wingerden, Pre-Sales Consultant, Liquidware.
I’ve been using Citrix technologies since the late 90’s and I must say that most EUC innovations seem to have been driven by virtualization companies. Looking back in time it was Citrix that originated session virtualization, application virtualization found it’s market driven by virtualization, optimizing the logon process by going above and beyond GPO’s, layering (disk, apps, profiles) to solve the management issues and, lately, I would say digital experience monitoring going beyond traditional system monitoring. But what I also found is that this has created silos within the IT department. In larger organizations you would be a Citrix admin, a VMware admin and/or a desktop admin, all dealing with the same major topic of EUC.
But what if there was a platform that would allow you to break these silos? What if there was a platform that could tell your needs and “translate” this into all the different desktop delivery “platforms”. The next iteration is either around the corner and/or already here depending on your company: AVD/CloudPC/Windows365. We’ve all by now experienced the war on talent one way or another. Sometimes for the better; more work than time, other times for the worse; project delays.
Zooming into the Citrix world let’s look at a few examples:
- WEM is nice but what if you could have the power of this available to all your desktops. What if there was a solution that was easy to deploy to all and onboarding AVD or “Intune”: managed modern workspaces would not be a threat but rather an opportunity to expand your service delivery.
- Citrix application layering – unfortunately it’s limited to just Citrix and it also has the limitation that for every major change (OS or storage choice) you have to repackage, making management a huge chore. Doable but perhaps not the most effective way to spend your time. What if you had a solution that could be used independent of your image choice and which could also be easy to deploy to any physical or virtual desktop and, most of all, be able to automate the whole process?
- CPU/Memory optimization is a powerful tool when it comes to scaling your environment but what if you could also apply it to all your desktops? This could mean in this era of chip shortage you could extend the life of every machine without compromising the user experience.
- Last but certainly not least, Citrix Analytics for Performance; what if you could have all that insight for all your desktops either virtual or physical. What if you could have proper insight in that perhaps your performance issues are not caused by corporate managed infrastructure but by end-user managed infrastructure?
All in all, in this hybrid world we currently find ourselves in, it no longer means all or nothing. Some use cases benefit from a virtual desktop solution while others are better suited with physical desktops. Do not limit your options and ensure you research the solutions in the market today.
