Citrix-The Ultimate Desktops as a Service Experience
A Discussion and Demo with Kireeti Valicherla, Principal Product Manager with Citrix; Paul Carley, Senior Product Marketing Manager with Citrix, and Mike Matchett, Principal Analyst and CEO Of Small World Big Data
DaaS Has Evolved
Mike Matchett says, “There's been an evolution in desktops as a service. We've gone from running virtual desktops on our on-premises architecture to getting services in the cloud, to now having a kind of deep, remote management” with less work. Citrix has taken desktops from an on-premises architecture into the cloud, and this webcast explores the steps IT orgs can take to get there.
Device Management Complexity
Paul Carley says, “A lot of customers today are concerned about their tech and managing their technology — [and] the complexities of managing those services. Software updates, patches, even endpoint management can be a challenge. And the new wave of employees are very tech savvy and want to use their own kind of devices, whether a Mac, Linux or even a Chromebook. How do you manage those endpoint devices?”
How Do You Provide Simplicity and Flexibility — Like IT as a Service — and Keep Costs Down?
Citrix Managed Desktops, says Carley, offer “the simplest and fastest way to deliver those desktops from Azure Cloud.”
He explains: “We basically bundled your Microsoft as a desktop, your Azure service, and made it easy to deliver it via virtualization. Using the Azure cloud — making it secure through things like Citrix Gateway, and using something called HDX, which is kind of our secret sauce — our high-definition user experience that gives end users [a] great experience every time that they log in.”
Matchett offers: “Putting desktops together would be a big staffing challenge, expertise challenge as well to learn all the bits, bytes, and stand that up and manage it 7/24. Particularly if [the] organization has a lot of distributed users, maybe even geographies, right. I mean, that's just multiplied the staff. And then keeping up to date on all the pieces as they evolve in parallel ... You've got the cloud evolving. You've got desktops evolving. You've got the virtual part evolving. It's all moving forward.”
Carley says: “We have a 25-year partnership with Microsoft. And Azure is one of the things that we work first and foremost with. We build a lot of our services on top of the Azure cloud today, a lot of our cloud services. So that gives us the capability. And because of our partnership with Microsoft, we have the great ability to optimize all these great Microsoft services that are offered today, and deliver them to customers and admins in the best way possible to make [them] easy to consume. Citrix has been authorized by Microsoft to deliver the benefits of this Windows Virtual Desktop today.”
A non-technical person can deliver apps and desktops anywhere for staff in hours (or even minutes), rather than days or weeks — and they can choose their device. People can access their work, anywhere in the world, no matter the device. And pay-as-you-go controls costs.
Kireeti Valicherla Demos Citrix’s DaaS
For the demo, Valicherla offers an example: “Let's say you have an Azure subscription with 1,000 machines, and each machine [has 10] end users. You're looking at 10,000 users. And if you're becoming very busy, for instance, you can add 20 users on a single mission, so you're looking at 20,000 users. So we can do this very easily now because of this technology,” he says.
Valicherla continues, “Typically, 20 years ago, if you had to do virtualization, you would typically get the virtualization license from a vendor like Citrix, you would buy hardware from someone, and then you are responsible for deploying all of these components and managing it yourself. That's kind of how the traditional model has always worked. We are calling it a do-it-yourself model. {It’s] really nice that many customers are still doing it this way, but they are looking at simplifying the mode.”
Cloud or On-Prem?
“Essentially,” says Valicherla, “the Controller, the StoreFront, Studio, Director, Licensing, and SQL, which are primarily for management office infrastructure, along with the NetScaler Gateway, which is for remote access … Those pieces are all delivered as a cloud service, almost as a PaaS service. where you don't have to worry about updating them, because Citrix is managing it and always pushing the latest updates almost every other week. And you're only responsible for the bottom half. We call them VDAs. That's where your apps and desktops run. They can either run on a Windows server or a Windows client OS.”
Mike Matchett says: “You can patch and upgrade. I think this is what most people think of at first when you say we're going to a cloud.”
Valicherla continues, “We essentially have taken the responsibility of even hosting these — the VDAs, the machines on which the actual apps and desktops run — and we are providing a managed offering there, but the customer still has the flexibility to bring their own image with their own apps on it.”
Valicherla adds, “Now you might be wondering, ‘hey, if this is running in your cloud, how does it or can it do my on-prem resources like do Active Directory or other resources such as like databases and other application data?’ So we still kind of make that possible. We have a couple of options. One, through a concept called Azure VNet peering, where we can peer to your Azure virtual network, and from there get it back to your on-prem or we can use Azure as the main solution to kind of make that connectivity happen as well. So it's kind of taking the simplification to the next level, but still providing the ability to kind of back it on-prem resources.”
Watch the Full Webcast and Learn More
The demo continues from this point, and Valicherla, Matchett, and Carley close out the webcast by responding to some great questions from our Truth in IT audience.
To follow the demo, watch the full 30-minute episode here: Citrix Ultimate Desktop as a Service Experience