Thursday 29 July 2010
All of these technologies enable, in one way or another more cool technologies like cloud computing (not the SaaS model, that ain’t cloud), Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), mobility, agile networking, better access controls, green computing, unified communications, and a network that actually configures around a user. I am not going to tell you these technologies are fully baked today. Some, like UC are pretty far along. Others, like CEE and cloud computing, not so much.
Storage is getting denser and faster with drives offering hundreds of GB of SSD storage that reads and writes data faster, runs cooler, and consumes less power. These are initiatives large and small that impact not only what runs over the network, but how the network runs.
It is amorphous and very loosely structured. A Cloud has no specific strength, organization or output. A hurricane on the other hand is “a storm system characterized by a low pressure center and numerous thunderstorms that produce strong winds and flooding rain”. A hurricane is organized, has form, purpose and an outcome. The center or eye of the hurricane is where the system is the most powerful and at the same time the calmest portion of the system. Cloud Computing is interestingly fraught with the same issues of its vapor filled synonym. It is amorphous and lacks specific direction from a business perspective. It promises a world of flexibility and responsiveness, but little is said about its’ from, organization, power and ability to generate an outcome, namely productivity and efficiency for revenue generation.
Citrix is addressing the entire spectrum of the Cloud. From Infrastructure as a Service (XenServer) to Desktop as a Service (XenDesktop) through application delivery providing Software as a Service (XenApp). This approach goes beyond theory to the basic elements of revenue generation. The very core technology of XenApp, for instance, is based on the concept that software should be ‘delivered’ as a service, not deployed. As the market continues to evolve, Citrix will emerge as a leader in this space because we had it in mind twenty years ago when we began to evolve server based computing.
