Notes from the Road Part 5: Citrix Synergy Barcelona

By Sean Donahue, Senior Director Global Alliance Marketing

Hello again from another Synergy. This one, however, is Synergy EMEA in Barcelona.

The clouds have parted, the torrential downpours from earlier in the week have ended, the sun is shining and so is a new day in hosted desktops from Citrix. Today, I am pleased to say that RES Workspace Manager is a flagship part of the Citrix Service Provider Program (CSP). We are in a small circle of ISVs who are integrating their products into the newly announced CloudPortal Services Manager straight away. We have been working very closely with the Dev and Support resources at Citrix. (And when I say closely, I mean daily meetings and a steady stream of e-mail threads bouncing ideas off one another for the best ways to leverage the CloudPortal for RES and our joint partners.) Basically, Citrix released the CloudPanel SDK and we ran with it like we stole it.

By incorporating RES Workspace Manager into the CloudPortal out of the box, Service Providers have the ability to leverage some of the most powerful capabilities of Workspace Manager to their trusted advisor and customers without having to do any heavy lifting themselves. This integration marks a milestone in the SMB market with the ease of adoption of new technologies without the burden of any up front cost and complexity. The end user only pays for what they have used in the month prior and gets billed for that in real time. This has the potential to reduce costs by huge amounts — not to mention removing the complexity of maintaining an on-premise backend infrastructure to support the latest desktop and application technologies.

Everyone is all a flutter today about clouds—public clouds, private clouds, hybrid clouds, etc. The concept of offering SaaS is not a necessarily new one. Companies like SalesForce.com and SAS have been doing it for years. Now, with the updates to the CSP program, every corner of the market can benefit from hosted Desktop as a Service (DaaS).

But with a new desktop comes the same productivity questions of yesteryear. What applications do my user needs to be productive? How can I ensure the look and feel that they are accustomed to on their traditional fat client install across the hosted virtual desktop? How can I guarantee security in presenting to the user only the applications they need and only when they need them and where they should be when accessing them?

Even with the CloudPortal removing the manual and separate tasks of provisioning users and desktops and even applications, the value of RES in this model is still tremendous. One and only one time the trusted advisor would need to setup the backend Workspace Manager configurations, and from that point on, every user who gets added to the CloudPortal and provisioned an application can fall under the previously configured context aware settings and management. It all becomes as easy as a click of the mouse and suddenly that new user has a desktop, all the apps they need and also has the context rules that will regulate how, when and where they can get those services lit up.

It is an exciting time to be in the cloud services arena, and I am thrilled that RES is in such good company with our fellow ISVs. This is just the start my friends of what will be a rolling thunder of service provider programs and capabilities in the cloud from RES.

Until next time. Stay virtual, my friends.