The Beginning of the Non-Dedicated Device World?

What makes your phone your phone? Or, for that matter, what makes your desktop, your laptop or your tablet yours? After all, millions of people own identical hardware/software configurations of iPhones, Android-based phones, tablets, laptops and other devices.

The answer lies in two defining aspects of each device: The user’s data that is locally-stored, and the user’s personalization information... More at  http://blogs.citrix.com/

The End of the Laptop-Centric World?

Is this you:  You own multiple laptops or desktop computers because you have different uses, jobs, clients or applications? 

Doesn't this seem ridiculously inefficient and wasteful - especially because we now in the "cloud era"?

Turns out there are quite elegant solutions that move us away from this "boat anchor" centric lifestyle where activity revolves around the laptop work hub.

The solutions I have in mind are not always broadly used, or for that matter, broadly known. But they are often quite simple, convenient, and even cost-advantageous.

Let me give you a hypothetical example - but based very much in reality (names have been changed to protect the innocent). And I'll share a very reasonable set of solutions, too.

Act I: The Setup
Let's take a consultant named Margo.  She runs a small firm with a handful of large corporate clients.  To accomplish her work she needs access to each client's intranet as well as a number of their secure, internal applications.  She also needs to share data with co-workers in her firm, as well as share it back to individual contacts within each client.

Each time Margo takes on a new client, they issue her firm a corporate laptop, usually equipped with VPN software and a 2-factor security app with a physical fob. Whenever Margo does remote work with a given client -- accessing the intranet, using internal apps, interacting via collaboration software, or even certain VoiP apps -- she must use the appropriate laptop.  And that's about 80% of the time.

To add to this, alongside each laptop, Margo uses a DropBox account with folders dedicated to each client. She shares these folders with her co-workers as well as client contacts within each company (and who are behind each client's firewall) as interactive project-based workspaces.

Act II: The (Troubling) Reality
Fast-forward: We have Margo with an office full of client-provided hardware. Together her firm is holding capital equipment that cost each client between $2k-$4k.  It's equipment inventory each of her clients have had to request, allocate, provision, track and maintain (and likely one day, recapture). Besides the cost and efforts to secure, the equipment is still subject to breakage, loss, theft and/or other forms of compromise. 

That's wasteful / risk-laden observation #1.

Next, we have the "DropBox problem": One day Margo realizes that she's running short of disk space on her own office tower computer. She tracks it back to the fact that her single DropBox account contains files from all of her co-workers representing the work from all of her clients... and it dawns on her that files from client A have been accessible to all other clients via the single DropBox account. She races to modify the access rights to various DropBox folders.

That's risk-laden observation #2

Finally, Margo finds herself on a business trip visiting Client A. She gets a call from Client B needing an urgent intervention. But since she isn't carrying the laptop from Client B, she's unable to help.

That's just plain silly observation 3

Act III: An Elegant Solution

All of these unfortunate scenarios are a result of a "PC Era" view of the world - where data, access and security are tied to the physical laptop. To be certain, there are absolutely scenarios where this should remain the case. But in Margo's case, the model is antiquated.  Let's move to the "Cloud Era" and see how things might be different.

Enter the concepts of "Mobile applications" and "Virtual desktops". In these cases, each of Margo's clients provides a shared (or dedicated) desktop OS behind their firewall. They might also provide a secure application streaming protocol for specific internal applications (think: SAP, accounting, web browsing, email, etc. etc.).  Both desktop and/or application gateway are made available as virtual desktops & apps via a web gateway to approved users.  All a user needs is a client device (laptop, iPad, smartphone) and a secure authentication mechanism.

So, Margo would simply carry her own personal laptop (or iPad, for example) as well as security fobs from each of her consulting clients.

Any time Margo needs access to work with a client, she connects to a gateway (think: click on an app) hosted by one of her clients, and enters her security credentials. Up pops a secure desktop belonging to one of her clients, just the way she left it the last time she accessed it.  All of her data files are there, as well as email and applications. And she'll have complete secure access to her client's corporate intranet.  In fact, she could even have multiple secure desktops from each of her clients up-and-running simultaneously on a single machine, with no security issues whatsoever.

But there's one difference: When she closes the session(s), no client data will reside on her laptop - safe and sound for her clients. And, no matter where she is, no matter what device she has (her own, a borrowed iPad, etc.) she can re-access those desktops and/or applications.  Pretty elegant.

What if Margo is "untethered"?  There's even a scenario for the untethered worker. She could install a virtual machine desktop on her laptop.  Within that secure "sandbox" would run the OS belonging to her client, with all access rights etc. Each time the device is connected to the net, the sandboxed OS (and its apps) would synchronize with her client's IT department. 

Oh - And what about that "DropBox Problem"?  With this model she (and her co-workers) can use a shared drive or service either (a) within the client's firewall, accessible whenever the virtual desktop is active, or (b) a separate shared drive brokered by a client's own gateway service.  Never would Margo risk data from one client being co-mingled with data from another.

In my opinion, the "PC era" will begin to ebb, as the concept of mobile apps and virtual workspaces begins to take hold. And as more IT departments become more comfortable with BYOD strategies and mobile work options, the more this trend will accelerate.

Here's saying goodby to the laptop-centric world.

Apps and Desktops and Clouds - Oh My!

A bunch of people have asked me about my new gig with Citrix.  "You're doing VDI and XenApp now? I thought you were a Cloud guy?" Yes, it's true...  and it’s due in part to today's announcements by Citrix about Project Avalon, the explosion of the Mobile Enterprise, and the Path to the Cloud. And it’s about helping corporate IT think and operate more like Service Providers do.

Mobility: A Perfect Use Case for the Cloud

Consider the use case to deliver huge numbers of applications and desktops across hundreds, thousands, or tens-of-thousands of mobile clients – Challenging for IT due to configuration, set-up, monitoring, management, network optimization and scaling.  Doubly challenging when you consider the different topologies of virtual servers, licensing servers, provisioning servers and more, all scaling at different rates to maintain service levels.

What better use-case than to apply a cloud operations model within which to deploy such a solution?

With appropriate cloud management and orchestration, much of the guesswork of infrastructure sizing, machine provisioning and network adjustments can be obviated. Management of heterogeneous apps, VMs and OS’s is a breeze.   Serving-up mobile apps – and even entire virtual desktops – out of a cloud infrastructure is a natural.  And therein lies beauty in this new technology.

A Perfect Technology Next-Step

To accomplish this, Citrix – partnered with customers and Service Providers – is embarking on a 2-stage journey called Project Avalon. This will let enterprises and/or service providers deliver Windows apps and desktops as a true cloud service from private, public and hybrid clouds for users on any device, anywhere.

In the first stage of the journey, the approach to installation, management and monitoring of the base infrastructure for virtual desktops & apps will be massively simplified (Get the Tech Preview here). Also, features such as the visual experience will be extended. Then in the second, this infrastructure will be fitted with the ability (a) to mix-and-match any underlying cloud platform (b) mix-and-match different Citrix and Windows platforms, and (c) integrate with sophisticated management and orchestration to provide scaling, fail-over and cloud platform migration.

Consider the possibilities – the ability to stand-up a complete mobile enterprise solution either on your private cloud, and/or public cloud. Think: CloudStack, Amazon, Azure. Or a combination.

Goal: Help SPs Be More Efficient / Help IT Operate Like an SP

The point of all of this is to deliver mobile desktops and mobile apps from any cloud to any device.  Some Citrix service providers (CSPs) are doing this now and Project Avalon will further simplify their effectiveness to deliver from their public clouds. They’ll be able to stand-up massively scalable mobile desktop and mobile application environments (think 0,000’s and more). This will allow corporate IT – whether SMBs or global enterprises – to source global mobility solutions to any device more effectively than ever before.

For the enterprise wishing to use their own private cloud for mobility services, Project Avalon will permit this too.  In fact, using this new architecture, one could even burst (or fail-over) from a private cloud to a public instance.

Corporate IT has always had what I term “SP envy” that SP’s already run IT like an efficient business and IT would like to be more like them. With Project Avalon, IT really can operate like an SP on an internal cloud. As I’ve said before, the worlds of IT and SPs are merging, and IT will be delivered "as a Service" rather than as an engineered offering. Project Avalon will help accelerate Bringing the Enterprise to the Cloud.

I'm excited to be part of the Citrix family, to be part of this important mix of cloud and mobility, and to help use the cloud paradigm in an applied way: To help people work and play from anywhere.

The CIO as The (IT) Supply Chain Manager

Guest blog on GigaOm...

The Rise of the Cloud Service Bus

In my recent GigaOm guest blog, I posited that the advent of hosted cloud services (particularly PaaS and SaaS) will slowly morph the role of the CIO into that of an IT Supply Chain Manager.

Technologically, I believe this move to a "Buy-and-Integrate" mentality (vs. a "Build-Everything" mentality) will open the door to a new class of products to assist with services integration. And, if you agree that the importance of leveraging external services will be elevated for the CIO, then I believe a significant enabling technology will be a rebirth of the need for a robust "service integration bus".

Why?  As I mention in my blog, enterprises integrating external services require:

 - Identity and access management for each provider
 - Data compliance, legal and regulatory audit access across each provider
 - Security compliance systems
 - Provisioning, including capacity forecasting
 - Performance (e.g. SLA) monitoring
 - Cost and budget tracking (i.e. for billing, showback and/or chargeback)
 - Disaster Recovery / Redundant service sources where needed

Some would call the above integration functions "Glue Logic." Indeed in the past, many of these functions were hand-integrated across the few external services that were leveraged, and custom-engineered into each internally engineered stack. But time is changing the model. With more turnkey services  sourced from cloud (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS) providers, the need for a more efficient integration function will escalate. Integration will need to be standardized and replicable, scalable and responsive to the business' needs.

You may recall one component integration approach has been the Enterprise Service Bus, primarily associated with SOA leveraging SOAP protocols. This Integration Bus was originally to orchestrate access and workflow between component services within the enterprise. (By the way, Microsoft offers a great overview of ESBs - albeit BizTalk centric - here on MSDN).

I believe that the "2.0" Integration Bus will be one which brokers higher-level services generated from external, public cloud providers - not just internal component services. And it will use more generalized interactions than SOAP, since the providers and their environments will be less standardized.

To this end, there are some great current/upcoming thoughts suggested by Mike Ponta of the notion of a "Cloud ESB", and can't wait to hear more.  A quick survey of the market also yielded what looks to be potentially promising integration technology coming out of Mulesoft called their CloudHub.

Conceptually, the "mashed-up" service was the 1.0 version of this integration concept. But as enterprise IT begins to regularly tap and integrate multiple external services, the 2.x integration busses will need a more structured, standardized and rapid approach to integration.

I can't wait to see what else the market will generate. Stay tuned.

Other resources/Blogs:

•  The CIO as a Business Service Conductor Blog by Andi Mann
•  Is today’s CIO really just another supply chain manager? Blog by Charlie Betz

Enablers for Transformed IT - Placing My Bets

It's an odd time of the year to be making predictions. But recent conversations with start-ups, CEOs, CIOs and others have suggested areas in Enterprise IT that I  bet will be "hot" over the near/medium term.

Some of the areas are "Sexy" (high on the Hype Cycle) - and others are not. But in my opinion all are worth betting on. They are all interrelated and all are critical enablers to the goal of a transformed IT ecosystem.

Already Sexy: Integrated Cloud Infrastructure Management
Of course you expected this one... But the betting opportunity isn't exactly what you think.

There are currently hoards of point-products professing "cloud management" - including the OpenStack/Cloudstack alternatives - but surprisingly, these still lack in providing a comprehensive solution that a reasonably sophisticated SP or CIO needs to buy.

In other words, I don't just mean a product that offers an automated virtualization (server, storage, networking) layer.... No: The real opportunity I expect to see here is an integrated comprehensive solution, that includes security, compliance, monitoring, financial metering, end-user provisioning portals, etc.  The winners in the space will either integrate these features too, or offer a pre-integrated bundle of best-of-breed point-products. And it's going to happen soon.

Not Yet Sexy: The Integration Bus
If you believe that most of IT's infrastructure is "going cloud" and that many 3rd-party services will be SaaS, then the role of the CIO will begin to shift from being a technologist (who builds things from ground-up) to being a Supply-Chain manager (who integrates multiple services from multiple sources).

To execute on its new role in the enterprise, IT will therefore become an integration point for internally- and externally-generated services. It will need to provide core identity, compliance, data exchange, security, and access infrastructure to properly "broker" all of these diverse services, providers and APIs.

It seems to me that the notion of an integration bus will become crucial. Such a bus will provide the "glue logic" between all services, and avoids tedious hand-coded integration points. In many ways this bus is a core intersection point between the internal and external cloud - the hybrid nexus, if you will.

Remember, it's not enough to have a service in a cloud. There will be a huge need for coordinating the interactions into/out-of (and between) cloud-sourced services. The need for such a service bus will quickly elevate to that of a critical IT enabler. A good bet to take.

Getting Sexy: IT Business Management
Building on the concept of IT as a "supply chain manager" is the concept of IT as a Service Provider to the business. This is sometimes termed IT-as-a-Service, where IT begins to run itself as a "business". While it may not literally have a profit motive, it will be forced to become functionally competitive with external services, to market itself, and to price itself competitively.

As I've written before, in order to think like a business, one critical enabler is to know fixed and variable costs, as well as cost allocations and cost sensitivities.

Thus, the segments known as IT Financial Management (ITFM), IT Business Management (ITBM) and/or Technology Business Management (TBM) will necessarily have to expand in importance.  This segment looks at the granular cost basis of infrastructure (including cloud service costs) and assembles a composite cost structure at the application and even service level. This permits IT to understand cost sources, provide decision support and forecasting for infrastructure changes, and provide a "bill of IT" showback/chargeback to internal service customers.  All critical in the new Transformed view of IT.

Too Sexy: Big Data Business Models

Careful here... I'm not speaking about Big Data infrastructure or analytics products per se. I'm referring to the business models that will soon be based on mashing-up and analyzing large quantities of structured/unstructured data to uncover new revenue opportunities.

As I recently mentioned, data-based business models will begin to complement existing product/service based businesses.  While adoption of Big Data technology is already penetrating the infrastructure market, the real opportunity is when it penetrates the lines-of-business people such as marketers, sales, and business development.

Companies that employ marketing professionals paired with "data scientists" are the ones to watch. The new business opportunities presented by the promise of cracking big data will be the driving force behind the infrastructure and technology purchases.

When will this transition happen?  I predict when companies begin to hire "Big Data product managers" and team them with BizDev and data scientists. Now that's disruptive and sexy.

The next generation business: Data is the new platform

Guest blog on GigaOm....