Citrix Workspace Services Promises Next Step Toward Virtual Workspace

At its annual Synergy Conference in LA’s Anaheim Convention Center on Tuesday, Citrix announced Citrix Workspace Services (CWS), its new flagship product. CWS is a management platform for controlling the creation, management, and delivery of distributed virtual workspace services across multiple public and private clouds. According to Citrix’s marketing message, CWS will design, build, and deliver amazing …

Death to Active Directory? Is the Windows Domain Still Relevant in the Modern IT World?

In a meeting recently, I was quite taken aback to hear a reason given for not moving to 2012 R2 forest functional level—a reason to which I hadn’t previously been privy. The stated reason was, “in a few years, the Windows domain won’t be relevant anymore.” As someone who cut his IT teeth on Windows …

Happy Birthday, Citrix — Now, Get Back to Work

Citrix is twenty-five this year. It’s done pretty well; not everyone can say that they created a market-defining end user computing platform that is used by every major organization in the world—and a few other places as well. So Happy Birthday, guys, and please take the rest of the day off. Just make sure you’re …

The Impact of the IaaS Price Wars

Public cloud IaaS providers are competing heavily on price. Watching Google, AWS, and Microsoft play the falling prices game is like watching a ping-pong match. It is just a matter of time before IBM’s SoftLayer matches the prices as well. Adrian Cockcroft wrote a great piece called The Real Story Behind the Cloud Price War, …

OpFlex, Standards-Based Protocols, and Cisco’s Messaging Problem

On April second, Cisco introduced something that seems to make a lot of sense in its new declarative-based, ACI-led world of software-defined networking: a policy mechanism. The blog post about it was pretty straightforward: it included the obligatory nods toward the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and open-source communities, defined the differences between the traditional …