Citrix joins the ‘reinvent the future of work’ chorus with a workspace app and security stuff Citrix has used its Synergy conference to pitch itself as a vendor capable of changing the way you and your users work. CEO David Henshall’s spiel is that organisation are using a multitude of on-prem, SaaS and cloud resources and users are therefore “having a hard time finding what they need” while “context switching” between …
As a reluctant "consumer" of my IT department's bizarre and apparently self interested choices, can I ask whether anything has changed with Citrix? In principle, I don't care two hoots how virtualised, containerised, cloudified or on-demandy the corporate desktop and systems are. But I do care if they are slow, clunky, and tedious to use, and those three words are the first that come to mind when I hear the word "Citrix".
Can other readers comment on whether things have changed, or is Citrix still a crap choice chosen to make IT's life easier without regard to the experience of the rest of the business?
"...is Citrix still a crap choice chosen to make IT's life easier without regard to the experience of the rest of the business?..."
And herein lies one of Citrix's biggest issues - perception.
So many times, I've seen Citrix implementations over the years that were literally just thrown in without any care or thought.
No tuning done, no performance benchmarking or proper testing.
VDI put in on an already over-congested SAN.
Networks that aren't up to the requirements needed to deliver a seamless experience.
Applications where users were just made admins because "hey it won't work otherwise"
Generic policies applying to Citrix servers.
Patches and updates applied ad-hoc without any care taken to ensure versions match across all the servers.
And on and on.
And the problem of course, is that once Citrix is perceived to be the issue it can't shake that perception - regardless of where the problem actually occurs.
A properly designed, properly maintained, properly understood Citrix* implementation can and will run well for many years. Indeed some of my own have only needed replacing 7-10 years after initial build simply due to the age of everything falling so far out of support to be laughable.
That's not to say Citrix is or ever has been a panacea. Not to mention I've lost count of how many times they've tried to rebrand themselves over the years, sometimes seemingly forgetting their core strengths.
*XenApp - I've never been sold on VDI as a solution. All the complexity of a desktop estate to manage plus the complexity of a thin client server backend + the costs of high performing storage etc. I've seen so few genuine use cases for it to ever understand why you'd bother for the most part.
Alas the only things that seem to change with Citrix at any great rate are their own ideas of what they do/where they are going :)
Perception is indeed the big point of contention. When you have an interface that is the first point of call and depends on everything behind it, the interface invariably gets blamed for SAN issues, network issues and sometimes even hardware issues.
The real problem is when management starts blaming the interface as well. Management should be listening to reports and getting info on what is actually the cause of the pain in order to properly decide what to do about it. Sometimes, management just hops on the same blame train and uses that as a stick to whack on the interface.
Sometimes it is also a convenient excuse to replace the interface - usually at great cost - with some other interface that will have exactly the same issues because that was not the problem. But that doesn't matter because the PHB having caused the change will then find other reasons to blame, and keep his bonus/new car/expensive gift from company having sold the new interface.
Totally agree. I have been working with Citrix and RDS solutions for years, and the number of times I hear "Shitrix, turdinal server, etc" when the actual problem is either back end server issues, network or just a very badly implemented RDS/Citrix solution.
Done right, it performs well, provides secure access from anywhere on any device and vastly improves client/server applications where the user is connecting on slow links by putting the client application near the data. HDX/ICA is still the remoting protocol to beat and the image management provided by MCS or PVS makes provisioning and updating images a breeze.
Xenapp/Xendesktop 7.x had a problem for anyone moving from Xenapp 6.5. It was essentially a new product and was missing some key features that 6.5 had. It has now caught up and overtaken the feature set.
Amusingly, Citrix have now decided to rename all their products again, but internally everything still seems to be called Metaframe, a name not seen for many years.
https://www.citrix.com.au/about/citrix-product-guide/
Here, have a system that runs on boxes and holds data on disks that live in a special room miles from where any real work gets done...
Just think how much energy we could save if we stopped using Shi... sorry Citrix to run PCs as dumb terminals and simply went back to proper Dumb Terminals with nowt but Monitor and Keyboard and, for those unable to figure out or remember keyboard "shortcuts", a mouse.
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