The last couple of days there is a lot of positive but also some negative commotion in the twittersphere about the announcements made at Citrix Summit/Synergy in SF.
Some of the announcements made:
- Server hosted VDI
- XenClient Enterprise (Citrix’s acquisition of Virtual Computer)
- Project Avalon
- a new release of AppDNA
- Project Aruba
- HP’s HDX SoC
- ShareFile, Podio and Receiver integration
- FP1 for XA
- The HTML5 Receiver
- CloudGateway 2
- GloudBridge 2
And much more..
What I see and hear is that people are disappointed about the fact that there are supposedly no major releases announced of XenServer, XenDesktop and XenApp but the real wow factor lies in the fact that Citrix is finally integration integrating all of their the “point” solutions bought in the last couple of years, so we can deliver the best services possible in the simplest way to our end users. Looking at Project Avalon, we were told that it’s an a complete stack of Citrix (or and non-Citrix) products to deliver services:
Project Avalon is a powerful new solution that brings together a wide range of Citrix technologies to help customers deliver any Windows app or desktop as a true cloud service. Rapidly deploy personalized Windows apps and desktops in a flexible, private cloud environment across single or multiple sites and utilize public clouds in a “capacity-on-demand” fashion. Leveraging the new Citrix CloudPlatform, powered by Apache CloudStack, makes it easy for existing customers to adopt new features at whatever pace they like. This allows them to mix and match different versions of Microsoft Windows Server®, Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenApp and span across any mix of public and private cloud infrastructure to host and deliver powerful, effective work styles for all users.
The architecture of Avalon:
On a high level this is an interesting article: http://blogs.citrix.com/2012/05/09/project-avalon-what-does-this-mean-to-me/
From a technical level this is a good explanation: http://blogs.citrix.com/2012/05/09/project-avalon-automating-windows-app-and-desktop-delivery/
So in the architectural overview makes clear that all products are used in Project Avalon are integrated to a complete solution, I heard a Citrite once say: “We’ve got all the right ingredients to make the bake, all we have to do..” Looks like Citrix is baking the cake as we speak.
Think about it, the integration between ShareFile, Podio and the Receiver leverages all the best of those point solutions with a single point of access, Project Avalon creates a vendor agnostic provisioned cloud platform which can deliver resources without interference of an IT organisation.
So the real ‘wow’ faction in integration, maybe it’s save to say that integration is the new innovation?
Kees Baggerman
Latest posts by Kees Baggerman (see all)
- Nutanix AHV and Citrix MCS: Adding a persistent disk via Powershell – v2 - November 19, 2019
- Recovering a Protection Domain snapshot to a VM - September 13, 2019
- Checking power settings on VMs using powershell - September 11, 2019
- Updated: VM Reporting Script for Nutanix with Powershell - July 3, 2019
- Updated (again!): VM Reporting Script for Nutanix AHV/vSphere with Powershell - June 17, 2019
I would rather address the linking of all products together by using Service Orchestration and the Cloud Gateway as your portal as collaboration instead of integration as all products keep their own identity (and development teams), but now have an additional goal ….. collabarating with the other products and product teams.
This is the true power of project Avalon in my humble opinion.
Linking of all products is a form of integration, looking at all innovations the key focus is on integration from my perspective. Collaboration doesn’t cover what’s happening in the Citrix Productportfolio.
Kees good point made here. Of course we all want to see the next best thing like XenApp 7 or Xendesktop 6, however the keynote was full of innovation.
My view on this is that there are so many companies that buy or make point solutions. Look at Quest, VMware and so on. Don’t get me wrong there are some very nice products there but the power of all is in integration! That’s why companies like Citrix and RES Software are so popular!
What Citrix has presented in the keynote is how they are integrating all the bought stuff from ShareFile, Podio, RingCube etc etc etc into their solutions.
One receiver that rules them all! The fact that we can get our users into our platforms and connect to all their apps and data, local and cloud, in a secure and controlled way, just by clicking on a single URL is amazing!
Chinese company Centerm announced a US$99 HDX SOC device! Amazing.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120511006127/en/Centerm-Information-Releases-High-Performance-Low-Cost-GM810-Series
[…] I just got home from another exciting Citrix Synergy Barcelona with a lot of new announcements and surely lots of new information to process. While I was processing all the new information I wondered about the components of these three projects and how people should position these projects so I decided to write a blog post about Citrix Project Avalon, Merlin and Excalibur. I wrote a blog post on Avalon a couple of months ago: Citrix: Project Avalon.. Integration is the new innovation! […]
[…] To read more on this topic please an earlier article written by Kees Baggerman http://blog.myvirtualvision.com/?p=1088 […]
[…] best part is not the innovation on products but seeing them all integrated into a great end to end solution for cloud based service delivery (apps/data and […]