By Patrick Hubbard, Head Geek, SolarWinds
Citrix and Microsoft have history: they've
been friends, rivals, and everything in between for decades. Now, Microsoft and
Citrix have taken their relationship to the next level by announcing a new,
multiyear partnership. This "
next step," as Citrix refers to it, will impact the future of remote working as we
know it and has the potential to help CIOs put their enterprises anywhere. And
for CFOs, it's yet another step in the evolution of traditional brands like
Citrix toward OpEx subscription options.
Remote Is the New Normal
Timing for the Microsoft Azure-Citrix
Workspace partnership is fortuitous. The events of 2020 all but confirm remote
work at some scale is here to stay. Meanwhile, your distributed workforce requires
a consistent and secure way to access desktop environments, even as many IT
budgets are being cut. The pandemic accelerated a trend already underway, with
teams considering new levels of remote working, or at a minimum demanding
contingency investment.
The pitch to IT teams for Citrix Managed
Desktops and Citrix Workspace in general is to simplify secure deployment of
desktops and applications to distributed workers from the cloud as needed. Azure
adds more hosting, application integration, and billing options to the mix.
Citrix generally does an admirable job of
shielding end users from its considerable features catalog and customization
options. CIOs will pay for management layers to improve reliability and at the
same time ensure non-tech workers don't need in-depth expertise to gain full
benefit. They can access their work on any device, in any location.
With the Azure partnership, Microsoft and
Citrix also seek to offer better desktop standardization in a patchwork of work-from-home
user endpoints. With workers on-premises, IT teams can streamline desktop
experiences into related cohorts. For example, most users on mid-tier Dell
laptops linked to the main data center via established WAN from the Seattle
office will share a common user experience. However, 10,000 employees working
remote each see one of 10,000 different experiences,
if only from a network perspective.
For other organizations, inconsistent
endpoint hardware can be an even larger challenge. If an employee, customer, or
supply chain partner has a laptop or a tablet you've given them, you have some
control over the commonality of CPU, memory, and everything else affecting the
end-performance of applications on that machine. However, many employees have
ended up on their own machines or on machines you can't directly service. It's
even more confusing if the business was forced to quickly buy and provision several
stopgap systems to move workers home in a hurry.
Citrix bread and butter has always been about
normalizing the interface and creating a consistent service abstraction from
endpoints. Being able to offer the same, familiar desktop across countless
locations reduces complexity and management headaches for tech pros.
2020 Grade Desktop Security
Desktop configuration and policy standardization
is often security governance step one, if only to reduce the cost of analysis
and configuration. Under the terms of this partnership, Microsoft will select Citrix
Workspace as a preferred digital workspace, and Citrix will choose Microsoft
Azure as a preferred cloud platform. Close security collaboration between the
partners may make "Citrix as a Service" more appealing than DIY options.
Further, a connected roadmap to enable a consistent, flexible and secure work
experiences can deliver and manage a larger set of services including Citrix
Workspace, Citrix SD-WAN, Microsoft Azure, and Microsoft 365. For a start, because
each user session (generally) launches a fresh copy of the OS, viruses and ransomware
find it harder to gain a foothold. Effective policy for 100 users can easily
and consistently scale to 100,000+, while Azure offers scalability as needed
without expanding on-prem.
How Citrix Will Change
The partnership is also a reflection of how
quickly the software industry continues to transition to subscription
licensing. Generally, end customers won't see much change beyond new license
options, but it will affect the revenue model for Citrix partners. While it's
too early to know exactly what the impact will be, at a minimum it will reduce
some opportunities for margin in perpetual licenses and renewals, or at least
affect how it works.
Citrix partners are an adaptable lot and have
weathered plenty of technology and licensing storms in the past. In the short
term, they'll offer clients huge value while helping businesses adopt to new
invoice options. They may also have new incentives for bundling other Azure
services for clients. Acting as MSPs sitting atop Azure, they'll transition from
selling equipment to driving cloud service consumption. Microsoft may need to reassure
the partner network occasionally they should be excited about it, but Microsoft
is generally good at supporting its large partner ecosystem.
Some things won't change. Cloud hosted desktops
can still add complexity and expand hybrid IT by moving traditionally on-prem
desktop resources to cloud. It may create multi-cloud monitoring and management
challenges, and there will be initial implementation costs-the list goes on.
However, as with most service-based applications, it's possible the cloud-based
Azure-Citrix deployments may lean less bespoke and more toward best-practice operations.
That's been a winning simplification formula CIOs increasingly seek out.
It will be interesting to see how enterprise
reacts. Businesses won't be forced to buy a great deal of the usual hardware that
could end up sitting idle. They could retire some technical debt, and they don't have to make large bets on
future on-prem investments at a time of unparalleled uncertainty.
What's in It for Microsoft
Microsoft sees an opportunity to adding
Citrix to the Azure Marketplace-offering yet another well understood, de facto
IT standard as a subscription service. The Microsoft pitch is to simplify
resource management and make it easier to control costs-you're dealing with a
familiar Microsoft billing system, along with Microsoft enterprise application
support. The partnership also moves virtual desktop delivery closer to where
workloads are increasingly going in Azure. It also gives Microsoft an
opportunity to bundle tightly integrated collaboration and communication tools
for remote users.
For example, there are plenty of opinions about
Skype in virtual desktop sessions, and they're not often positive. With the Citrix
partnership, Microsoft has signaled its intent to deliver easy to manage virtual
desktop Teams collaboration and one assumes additional integration with Office 365.
This could result in a smoother experience for both users and administrators. It
may not be checkbox management easy but should be closer to configuration than
development work for IT teams. Again, Citrix partners should be helpful here. It's
not an easy button-that's prevented in virtual desktops by the natural laws of
the universe. But it essentially an easier button on top of Citrix.
Citrix and Azure also have overlapping
customer bases, especially with respect to Windows. For its part, Citrix's
margin from Azure deployment may be slightly less, but easing deployment complexity
may drive wider adoption. In the end, the partnership is also a natural, even
obvious move. Citrix's customers are moving to cloud just like everyone else, so
why wouldn't they partner to put it in the marketplace alongside so many of the
other apps and services their customers increasingly rely on?
Win-Win for IT Organizations
If you're all-in on AWS, the Microsoft-Citrix
partnership may not be as attractive to you. That's why Citrix is most
certainly not announcing they're single-sourcing their cloud to Azure. The Citrix
partner or internal dev team you rely on today can continue to support your applications
on AWS, GCP, or on-prem with no changes.
If you're migrating to Azure, the partnership makes it easy to attach Citrix delivery costs to your
existing Azure invoices. It also provides added scale-out flexibility crucial in
unprecedented times. It also may enable smaller businesses to reconsider using virtual
desktops if the complexity is in line with other Azure services designed for
business teams.
In either case, you'll still need to monitor
your Citrix environment, and with Azure delivery, you'll need to configure
cloud resource monitoring in your dashboards. Fortunately, cloud infrastructure
monitoring is becoming mature enough to make the transition easy. This is handy
because cost management will be more important than ever, as is always the case
with cloud.
The dark side of consumption-based billing is
unused resources, sprawl, and resource sizing guesswork to prevent bottlenecks.
They can create real, unexpected invoice consequences. Broad monitoring will be
required to ensure you're not paying for hosting resources you aren't using. Custom
apps in particular will need accurate utilization and performance data to deliver
acceptable user experiences using the fewest possible resources.
Before the unprecedented adaptations for the
pandemic became the "new normal," software as a service, especially storied
vendors, and adoption of subscription options were already becoming a new
normal. The Microsoft-Citrix partnership and entry into the Azure marketplace is
a part of this trend. And the timing for both companies couldn't be better. The
world's "New normal" has IT seeking virtual desktop and applications delivery
options as never before. Perhaps timing really is everything.
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About the Author
PATRICK HUBBARD, Head Geek
An accomplished technologist with over 20 years of
experience, Hubbard's career includes software development, operations, product
management and marketing, technology strategy, and advocacy. An unapologetic
market-hype deconstructionist, Hubbard is passionate about arming technology
professionals with the tools and skills to deliver services that delight, not
just satisfy, users. Hubbard's current focus is helping enterprises adopt
cloud-native and DevOps techniques that deliver the business transformation
CIOs increasingly demand.
Since joining SolarWinds in 2007, Hubbard has
combined his technical expertise with an IT customer perspective to drive product
strategy, launch the Head Geeks, develop and manage the SolarWinds
Certified Professional (SCP) and SolarWinds Academy
Training Classes programs, and create the SolarWinds online demo platform.
Today, most admins recognize Hubbard as the executive producer of the Telly
award-winning SolarWinds Lab, and SolarWinds THWACKcamp.