I spoke to someone at VMworld after hearing about VMware Horizon Flex that was dubious, saying something like “They already tried this with ACE, what makes you think it’s going to work this time?” My hasty response was something like, “It’s 2015 now. It’s a whole new world, so let’s see what happens,” and now that we’re a few months removed I wanted to revisit it.

VMware Horizon Flex, their managed Type-2 client hypervisor, does look an awful lot like ACE (which stood for Assured Computing Environment), but since ACE is now the acronym for Application Configuration for the Enterprise, a new name was required (I'm sure there were other reasons...right?). It seems recent, but the original VMware ACE was discontinued at the end of 2011! Nevertheless, the features are the same: centralized client virtual machine provisioning, management, and policies.

There are some differences, like changes to the UI from four years ago, and the fact that Flex uses the “Pro” versions of both VMware Player and VMware Fusion with enterprise functionality that didn't exist before. They add up to a more manageable, more useable product, but nothing seems like that big of a departure from the first go-round. So if it didn’t work out before, why bring back what amounts to a more modernized version? After all, this is what VMware had to say when they discontinued it the first time:

"While a small number of customers found value using VMware ACE, the product did not meet the needs of a broader market. The customer demand for ACE no longer justifies VMware’s continued investment in product development, testing and technical support."

There’s one reason, and one reason alone, that this will work: the hardware is so much better than it was in 2011. All the Type-2 client hypervisors back then were ahead of their time, and though they did great things, they had so few resources to work with that the ultimate end user experience was “just ok” when compared to a native experience. “Just ok” is not the recipe for longevity, so companies focused on Type-1 client hypervisors and their better experience while sacrificing flexibility of deployment options.

Today we have no such problem. Hardware is cheap and plentiful, and we can both run and centrally manage multiple virtual machines on client devices without first wiping the client device (as we had to do with the Type-1 hypervisors). The hardware is also more capable, with more low-level functionality that supports virtualization and allows direct access to hardware. The Type-2 client hypervisors take advantage of this, so they should get some of the credit, but really it all comes down to hardware.

This rekindled attention towards Type-2 client hypervisors is something we’re seeing around the industry. Citrix recently killed off XenClient, and though they haven’t said so yet, I expect they’ll release a Linux version of their Type-2 DesktopPlayer line to go along with the Mac and Windows versions available today. The Linux version isn’t required for home users or contractors, but it is required as a XenClient replacement, and to compete with VMware Workstation Player Pro for Linux.

While it may not have worked before, the future looks good for Type-2 client hypervisors today. The use cases that they enable IT departments to manage, like home users, contractors, traveling users, containerized OSes and applications, have always been appealing, but the overall experience was never great. Today it can be, and that’s exciting.

Last week I had the opportunity to catch up with Cloudhouse, makers of a product called Applications Anywhere that is part of the new breed of tools in the Application Management category. Mat Clothier, Cloudhouse’s founder and CTO, has spent many years with dealing with application management, having been with Endeavors (now Numecent) before starting up Cloudhouse. Their original approach was something very similar to what others are doing in the space, combining packaging with a small amount of virtualization to deliver and manage applications more easily than the classic methods (base image, SCCM, App-V, etc…), but recently they’ve made a few changes.

If you're not familiar with Cloudhouse, they were a sponsor at BriForum London 2015. You can view the video of the sponsored session for a complete explanation of their platform. We also recorded an interview with Mat Clothier at their booth:

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Their original approach was very similar to the methods we’ve been using for packaging for a long time, and in a lot of ways they still are. There is an agent component that talks to a management server and receives applications, and there is a packaging component that collects installation snapshots in order to build the package. Cloudhouse has focused on selling their product to ISVs since their inception, and in the last year or so branched out to selling directly to enterprises. Most recently, they started working closely with Microsoft to see how Cloudhouse Applications Anywhere can fit into the Windows 10 / Azure movement. What they’ve come up with is interesting.

Microsoft’s plan for Windows 10 adoption and application management is based primarily on Universal Apps, which is a fancy way of saying apps delivered via the Windows Store. Since there aren’t many of those today, especially in the enterprise, Microsoft has created several “Bridges” to turn existing, non-Universal Apps into Universal Apps, which I wrote about a few months ago in detail. Though they’re an excellent first step, but for the most part you’re going to need access to the source code to use these Universal Windows Platform Bridges (the real name, but we’ll stick with Bridges because that’s a mouthful). As such, each of the four Bridges (iOS, Android, Classic Windows, and Web Apps) is intended for use by ISVs, not end users, so they’re not helpful to companies trying to find a way to better manage their own classic Windows apps, especially apps that were designed for Windows XP or IE6.

To address the gap, Cloudhouse has created an Azure-based offering that will soon be available from the Azure Marketplace that places the management component of their offering in the cloud as a multi-tenant service. You can simply subscribe to Cloudhouse Applications Anywhere and manage your applications from Azure. Of course, you’ll still have a packager to create the packages, but once uploaded into Azure, they can be delivered to any user, anywhere. The packager can reside on premises or in the cloud.

This is different from using any other Application Management product, even a classic one like App-V, in the cloud. For example, while you can stand up your own instance of App-V somewhere, you still own and maintain the system. With this new offering from Cloudhouse, Application Management is simply available as a service with nothing that you have to install to make it work.

Cloudhouse’s technology works using a combination of virtualization, redirection, and automated installation, which you can even use to run applications made for Windows XP that won’t run on Windows 7 or Windows 10, applying tweaks on the fly for each platform based on what the application needs. It can also virtualize IE6, a feature that they say Microsoft not only condones, but actually endorses when customers have such a need. That’s right–Microsoft has actually sent customers that need IE6 on Windows 7 or Windows 10 to Cloudhouse. My how the times have changed!

For IE6, they lock the user out of the browser elements that could be risky, only allowing the users to run specific applications. If a user manages to click on a link to an external website, that request is redirected to the default browser on the machine. 

Beyond the management stack living in Azure, it’s pretty much the same process. There is one unique element that Cloudhouse can do now that nobody else can: integrate into Azure RemoteApp. By managing application packages from Azure, you now have the ability to add those applications via Azure itself. You still need to create a Hybrid RemoteApp template (as opposed to Cloud-Only) so you can install the Cloudhouse agent software, but from the template itself you’ll have the ability to add Cloudhouse applications.

This is an interesting twist in the Application Management scene. There are products with unique features that set them apart from the pack, and there are others that are simply doing some sort of creative packaging. This gives Cloudhouse an angle that nobody else has right now (though there’s nothing preventing anyone else from doing so), so we’ll have to see how this plays out. Who knows, as Microsoft ever so gently eases themselves into DaaS, this could become a very useful feature to them. In the meantime, Cloudhouse will continue selling the on-premises version of Applications Anywhere, and you can learn more on their website, cloudhouse.com.

Since the iPad Pro was announced, I’ve been quietly sitting on my hands avoiding this very article. Personally, I’m sort of over the iPad as a productivity device. I’ve downgraded in size to the iPad Mini, and I basically use it to play Pinball Arcade and do some other occasional gaming or web browsing. 

Don’t get me wrong–I’ve tried to use them as a productivity device over the years. I’ve had a number of keyboards, and one of them combined with the Citrix X1 Mouse certainly makes for the most useable setup, but when I have to lug around three things just to do my job it sort of takes away from the extreme portability, low weight, and overall thickness that serve as the primary marketing points.

Every time I tried, I found that my laptop was simply the better option. And why shouldn’t it be? My current laptop weighs in at 3.5 lbs, and it does everything I could ever need. It has all the apps (ok, all the apps except iOS apps), all the OSes, all the storage, and all the power I need, plus a keyboard and a trackpad, in one device with a larger screen.

So when the iPad Pro was announced, it was met (by me at least) with a hearty “meh.” There was no clamoring to get my hands on one as there was with prior versions. I just don’t see the point of lugging around a device even larger than the iPad Air, while still having to bring along a keyboard and mouse to do anything with the current apps that I need to use.

Still, I keep hearing the same exact song we’ve been hearing since the first iPad was announced. I hear about how it’s a laptop killer because you can buy a keyboard case, or because you can run iOS apps side by side, or because you can buy a stylus pencil. But how exactly is it a laptop killer when in order to use it you have to effectively make it a laptop?

From an enterprise perspective, I can hear the arguments now. Let’s dig into some of them:

It’s smaller

While it may be thinner, the unladen iPad Pro’s length and width (12” by 8.68”) are surprisingly similar to the MacBook Pro that I use today (12.35” by 8.62”). Since you need a keyboard to make it a “laptop killer,” though, you have to factor in the keyboard case dimensions, too. The Apple-branded keyboard is slim and doesn’t add too much to the .27” thickness of the iPad Pro, but the Logitech CREATE backlit keyboard that most closely resembles a laptop keyboard makes the iPad Pro .78” thick, which is actually thicker than the MacBook Pro’s .71”!

It’s lighter

The iPad Pro 1.57 lbs, which is pretty light considering its size. But remember, we have to make it a “laptop killer” by adding in the weight of the Logitech keyboard. That bumps up the weight of the total package to 3.17 lbs, making it weigh only slightly less than the 3.5 lb MacBook Pro, more than 2.9lb 13” MacBook Air, and significantly more than a 2 lb MacBook.

It’s cheaper

I don’t want to make a cost model comparing overall platform costs here, so I’ll stick to the basics. The most basic 32GB WiFi-only iPad Pro runs $799, and in order to get the keyboard case you’ll have to shell out another $149, so you’re already at $948. Add in the stylus (we’re replacing a laptop, but still probably using desktop-oriented apps) and your price goes up another $99 to $1047 for the base model, $1197 for the 128GB + WiFi model, or $1327 for the high-end 128GB + cellular model.

Since I’ve only been comparing to Apple laptops so far, let’s look at the costs of the MacBook line. The base model 13” MacBook Pro and MacBook cost $1299, so yeah, everything but the highest-end iPad Pro is cheaper. But, the base model 13” MacBook Air is only $999. Keep in mind, the 13” MacBook Air has a larger screen, a backlit keyboard, is lighter, and thinner (smaller in all dimensions, actually) than a fully-loaded iPad Pro with the Logitech keyboard case.

I suspect if you compare the pricing to Dell and HP, you’ll find even more favorable differences between their product lines and the cost of an iPad Pro.

You can manage it as a mobile device

This statement is certainly true, but it’s not a unique feature these days. Both OS X and Windows 10 are manageable with MDM platforms, so I wouldn’t call this anything other than an expected aspect of a modern device. You can manage any new laptop that you buy today with the exact same management tool that you manage your mobile devices with. Enough said.

Enterprise computing is dead

Bah! Sure, the world is moving away from traditional enterprise computing with IT at the center of the universe, but realistically speaking that isn’t happening quickly. If you were deploying all web and iOS-based apps, then go ahead and deploy whatever device you want to your users. But you’re probably not, and like most companies you have a mix of apps that you have to deliver that will remain well into the future.

There are two big takeaways for me from this little exercise. First is that in order to make the iPad Pro into a “laptop killer,” you basically have to make it a laptop, otherwise it’s just a large tablet. Laptop users that simply consume content are one thing, but laptop users that are creating content require more than just a tablet, no matter how large the tablet is. One of the other features I hear about is being able to run iOS apps side by side, which to me seems like a less flexible version of having your applications in regular old windows. Again, though, it inches the tablet closer to the laptop in terms of functionality. (Add a trackpad to the keyboard case and some sort of ARM-based hypervisor that can run Windows and voila! Surface Tablet!)

The second takeaway is that with iOS the things that you can do are still limited. Yeah, I have Office and stuff now, but is that experience really better (or even the same) than on a laptop? What about those other apps that I need for my business. There’s certainly a large contingent of them that aren’t web or native iOS yet, so you need to build some other delivery mechanism (like RDSH or VDI) to get them to the users. Is it really worth the hundred bucks you might save by not buying a laptop?

I understand there are a lot of factors involved in the decision that go beyond the raw numbers, and I’d love to hear what yours are. It just seems to me that the advances in technology that have enabled powerful tablets have also affected laptops, so at the end I’m going to choose the device that lets me do more with less stuff to keep track of.

The last time we covered Ericom, they'd renamed their flagship product to Ericom Connect along with their 7.0 release. That release brought about a complete rewrite of their platform that focuses on scalability, ease of use, and reporting. It relies on an in-memory grid that is spread across multiple Connect servers that can support 100k concurrent users with room to grow. Brian wrote in more detail about the initial release in March, so you can check that out for more details. Today, I want to cover what's been going on since then.

Yesterday, Ericom released Ericom Connect version 7.3 which represents the most significant update to this point. It adds some features that you'd just expect a desktop virtualization platform to have, like delegated administration roles and client updates, but it also includes things like multi-datacenter support, multi-tenancy, and better cloud integration and automation. While multi-tenancy might be aimed at service providers, support for multiple datacenters and better cloud integration are good for everyone. Here's a quick rundown of what's new:

Multi-datacenter

Their multi-datacenter features are aimed at making it easy to manage Ericom Connect environments from a single installation console. This applies to both standalone environments and to branch offices that are part of Ericom Connect Grid. Terminal Servers and desktops at each location can be tied to individual Ericom Secure Gateways so that users always go through the gateway closest to the server/desktop.

Cloud Readiness

Ericom tests their platform on Azure and has customers that leverage both Azure and AWS, so they've put a lot of effort into the integration process to make it as easy as possible to deploy and use. While this was possible before by standing up your own systems manually, they've added support for the SQL APIs from both Azure and AWS. (Ericom Connect uses SQL as a failsafe, but the database that it uses in real time is in-memory on the grid.) This integration with PaaS offerings means that you can quickly stand up an environment without having to stop to set up your SQL environment. For example, with AWS you can create a Cloud Formation Template that sets up the entire environment for you. 

Multi-tenancy

We don't need to explain multi-tenancy, but it's worth noting that Ericom has put in the effort to make Connect into a multi-tenant product that service providers can use to build their DaaS offering. This same multi-tenancy can be used by companies to isolate critical applications or environments as well, or to maintain separate (but still centrally-managed) contractor environments.

Client Features

Ericom has put a lot of weight behind their HTML5 client AccessNow, but they also continue to develop AccessToGo (a mobile client) and AccessPad (a traditional client). Each has had features added to it recently. AccessNow supports an offset mouse cursor, which isn't new to those of us that have used mobile clients in the past, but when you consider that this is all done in HTML5 it's impressive. AccessToGo now has the ability to print and transfer files, and AccessPad has new pre-configuration options and support for SSO using the local Windows user account.

Wrap-up

You can get access to demos from Ericom's website, and if you haven't yet tried their HTML5 client you can try a live demo of it at an.ericom.com. They are very proud of the short amount of time it takes to stand up an Ericom Connect environment, so if you're bored in the next week maybe you should give it a shot. They have an excellent set of documentation to get you started, which you can find at guide.ericom.com. If you've got some time now, check out their Getting Started Guide. I'm told you can have it running in under an hour. If you want to know everything there is to know about Ericom Connect, the Deployment Guide goes into detail on every aspect of the system, including clients and cloud integration.

If you're an Ericom customer using Ericom Connect, I'd love to hear what your thoughts are in the comments. I've got some downtime next week leading up to Thanksgiving. I might give it a shot.

You might have heard of Citrix’s CTP program (of which I’ve been a proud member for many years), but you probably haven’t heard about what goes on at the semiannual meetings because they held under a strict NDA. At these events, various product teams present current problems, initiatives, and future roadmaps to the group of 49 people (!) and ask for feedback. Each of us has a different background and specialty, and most importantly, each of us has a different perspective. Citrix knows that if they ask a question and we all have the same answer, they should probably listen.

Apparently we all agreed with something Chris Fleck said :)

Things get interesting when we don’t have the same opinions (either between the CTPs or between us and Citrix...or both), and the tightly packed agenda rarely stays on time. The discussions are very frank and open, which is the purpose of the group. The protracted discussions always spill out into the hallways, then to dinner, then to the hotel bar. They may seem combative at times, but everyone in the room (CTPs and a fair number of Citrites) is there for the same purpose, so even the “worst" critique is still constructive and well-meaning.

We talked about the most recent CTP meeting (which was last week in Fort Lauderdale) on our BrianMadden.com Podcast with Claudio Rodrigues last week. As you can imagine, we were particularly interested in attending this one because of all that has happened between the last meeting in May and now. Citrix has undergone a lot of changes that have been well-documented, and so heading into the meeting I was very curious to find out how their efforts to “focus on core” have been coming along. I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised. In the past, the meetings are peppered with new technologies and tangential ideas, but this time around it was all about core products like XenApp, XenDesktop, CWC, XenServer, XenMobile, ShareFile, and Netscaler.

Of course, I can’t talk about specifics, but as Claudio and I stated on the podcast, it was quite apparent based on the discussions we had that Citrix has, indeed, found its center and is once again “dancing with the one that brought them.” I mentioned this to several people during the meeting that also agreed. Everything they announced earlier in November appears to be taking place, and though it’s tough on employees during layoffs, the product direction is certainly more focused. Citrix still has to execute their vision, but so far, so good.

Admittedly, you have only my word to take on it for now, though hopefully you’ll share the same opinion after Summit and Synergy this year. 2016 should be an interesting year for Citrix on many fronts. We’ll find out publicly how the re-focus and restructuring is going, and we’ll also learn about the effects of Elliott’s involvement, a forthcoming new CEO, and the results of any potential acquisitions (either by Citrix or of Citrix).

I know this article is light on detail, but I thought it would be good to share my sentiment after being on the inside for a few days. It’s an exhausting meeting, but in the best way possible. Perrine Crampton and Brad Nunn do a fantastic job. Maybe after Summit we can all talk about some more specific things! 

Here we go again! I'm happy to announce that the BriForum 2016 Call for Papers process has been opened, and we are now accepting submissions for both BriForum London and BriForum Boston, our 19th and 20th BriForums! Before we get to that, though, we have some details of the shows to share. The BriForum website is in the process of being updated, so for the time being this is all the information we have to share. In the next few weeks, though, you should see more information on BriForum.com.

BriForum London will be held 19-20 May at etc.venues St Paul's location. This is our fourth year at this location, and we love it for its layout, modern feel, and location within the city.

Our US show is returning to Boston, to the same place we had BriForum in 2014. This year, BriForum Boston will be held at the Searport Boston Hotel July 26-28. Seaport Boston might be my favorite venue. It's even accessible via water taxi from the airport!

More details will be available on BriForum.com in the coming weeks, but you can see last year's lists of sessions (London and Denver) to get an idea of exactly what BriForum is all about. Each year, it continues to be the conference to attend for unique, expert-level sessions from independent experts from around the world.

Why don't we have session information for 2016 yet? Easy...we don't have any sessions yet! That's where you come in. Each year we ask you to submit sessions for the show, and last year we got a record 190 submissions! It's a good problem to have, and the more sessions we have, the better we can make BriForum. This year is no different, so let the Call for Papers process begin!

Call for Papers

If you're new to the process, here's how it works: You fill out a survey with all the information we might need about your sessions. This includes your contact information, session title, 3-5 takeaways from your session (things attendees will be able to show their boss), and a concise (but detailed) abstract. You'll also be asked to indicate what level of experience an attendee should have. If you think you can give two sessions, one entry level and one expert, let us know in the Notes section (or submit two sessions…that would be best). Typical sessions are 75 minutes long, so shoot for that.

We know there are many great topics out there that can’t sustain a full 75-minute session, and we also know that we'll want to accept more sessions than we have room to accommodate. For those reasons, we have Lightning Rounds. Lightning Rounds are 15-minute mini sessions that we use to start conversations about fringe topics or to give quick rundowns of a topic. Sometimes speakers have used them as a primer for another full-length session later in the show. If your session could be done in 15 minutes, please let us know when filling out the survey. It helps when we make the selections, rather than going back and asking you. Unfortunately, we can't pay for your travel if you're only accepted for Lightning Round session, but we will give you admission to the conference and a seat at the table for the Speaker Dinner.

If we accept your session, we’ll pay for your travel, accommodations, and conference admission to the city where your session is placed, even if it’s for both shows! There is also an exclusive speaker dinner the night before each event, which had proven to be one of my favorite parts of each BriForum. Please note that we will only pay for travel and accommodations for the primary speaker of a full session. While we’d like to pay for co-presenters and Lightning Round speakers, we simply can’t. Co-presenters and Lightning Round speakers are, however, given complimentary conference admission and a seat at the speaker dinner, along with our undying appreciation for participating. If a speaker is both a primary speaker and is also co-presenting or hosting a lightning round, they will be covered, of course.

Sessions

Our focus, as usual, is on the End User Computing space as it relates to Desktop Virtualization and Enterprise Mobility. We want sessions that cover things like VDI, RDSH, Windows, hypervisors, DaaS, storage, hyper-convergence, MDM, MAM, MIM, security, cloud storage, and anything else you think is relevant to the discussion. In the past, we've had sessions about how future storage technologies will change the world and IoT. We want BriForum's content to reflect what's on the mind of the community today, so if you think it's important, let us know!

With that said, there are a few rules:

Rule #1: You must submit your own session.

The first thing we do is check to see if the speaker is the same as the person that submitted. You will be disqualified immediately if you have your PR firm send in your session for you.

Rule #2: Speakers employed by a vendor in the EUC space can speak, but not about their own products.

We're pretty strict on this one. For example, David Stafford is a BriForum alumni that works for Dropbox, but he's not allowed to submit a presentation that covers Dropbox for Business. He is, however, allowed to speak about cloud security or the process that companies have to go through on-premises to move their data to the cloud. Brian, Jack, and I decide whether or not something crosses the line, so if you think your idea could be erroneously disqualified under this rule, make sure you let us know in the notes. If you're a vendor that wants to have a session talking about your products, we have separate, sponsored sessions for that. You can learn more about sponsored sessions on BriForum.com or by contacting your TechTarget representative.

Rule #3: Your title should be concise, and your abstract should be interesting.

Our selection process focuses on the title and abstract before we ever look at speaker names. Even Tim Mangan, the only other presenter besides Brian to speak at all 18 BriForums, has to have a title and abstract that we like before we find out it was his session.

Ready to submit?

If you're ready, great! Click on the button below. BriForum Call for Papers is open from now until FRIDAY February 19th, at which point we’ll begin our selections. That process takes some time to work out, so we’ll make the final announcement on February 26th. (If you want to see what that process looks like from an outsider's perspective, check out Kevin Goodman’s article as he watched us go through the final round of selections. It’s the hardest thing we do all year.)

We're so excited to start this process. It's by far the hardest and most fun thing we do all year, and we're as proud as ever of the content at BriForum. Many attendees have become speakers over the years (around 20% of the speakers each year are first-time presenters at BriForum), and we're looking forward to see what sessions 2016 brings!

What follows is a list of topics that we want to cover at BriForum. Feel free to use this as a guide when thinking of ideas, but if there’s something that you’re excited about that isn’t on the list, submit that, too!

Desktop Virtualization

• VDI / Datacenter-hosted desktops
• Blade PCs / Blade workstations
• VDI products, like Citrix XenDesktop, VMware View, Microsoft Remote Desktop Virtualization Host (RDVH), Quest, Symantec, etc.
• Client-based VMs and client hypervisors (both Type 1 and Type 2)
• Microsoft Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH)
• Citrix XenApp and the Citrix Access Platform
• Desktops-as-a-Service (DaaS)
• Storage Optimization
• Smaller SBC vendors, such as Dell (vWorkspace), Ericom, 2X, Jetro Platforms, Propalms, HOBsoft, Leostream, etc.

Desktops-as-a-Service (DaaS)

• Comparison of providers (VMware Desktone, TuCloud, Amazon WorkSpaces, etc.)
• Internally-hosted DaaS versus cloud-based external DaaS
• Single application DaaS versus whole desktop solutions

Windows Desktop Application Management

• App virtualization
• Microsoft App-V
• VMware ThinApp,
• Citrix XenApp Streaming
• Symantec Workspace Virtualization (formerly Altiris SVS)
• Smaller vendors, such as InstallFree, Spoon.net, etc.
• App streaming
• Apps streamed to local devices
• Remoting apps to local devices (from datacenters and the cloud)
• “Traditional” Windows app management and installation versus “new” ways

Consumerization

• FUIT (ways that newly-empowered users are getting around IT policies)
• Security
• Bring Your Own Device (BYOD)
• Federated application management (combining Windows desktop, mobile, and web apps)
• Identity management
• Integrating cloud-based and SaaS apps with enterprise apps
• New “consumerization” features of Windows 8.1

Enterprise Mobility

• Mobile Application Management (MAM) and mobile applications
• Mobile Device Management (MDM)
• Mobile file sync
• Mobilising existing applications
• Mobile Information Management (MIM) and alternative techniques for EMM
• Mobile virtualization and other specialized Android devices (Samsung SAFE, KNOX, etc.)
• iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry management and deployment
• Tablet platforms, Windows versus iOS, etc.

Installing and Managing Centralized Applications

• Operations Management
• Application Streaming and Virtualization
• Business Impacts created by Server-based Computing
• Cloud Computing (as it related to desktops and apps)
• Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Licensing
• Scalability and High-Availability
• Security
• Scripting and Programming

Each year, Citrix Summit turns out to be a pretty active event in terms of announcements. We don’t attend since it’s an NDA event, but we do keep tabs on what’s going on. Yesterday, Brian covered the announcements Citrix made (or that people talked about), and today I want to go over the announcements from other vendors that caught my eye. We’ll catch up with these vendors in the coming weeks, but here’s a quick rundown of what went on:

Dell

ThinOS 8.2 supports Lync 2010, Lync 2013, and Skype for Business via the Citrix HDX RealTime Optimization Pack. Basically, this is saying “By choosing ThinOS-based thin clients, you don’t have to lose this feature,” because the Citrix HDX RealTime Optimization Pack is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows, too. Users now get the full Skype for Business UI, which supports things like call delegation, team groups, and response groups that previous versions of the RTOP didn’t do. Bottom line: ThinOS supports all that now.

New version of the Dell Appliance for Wyse, a 2U box that combines the storage, networking, and compute resources. It scales up to 5,000 users, so don’t call it HCI, but it means you don’t have to spend so much time working out your balance of hardware. Of course, 5,000 users depends on workload, but I suspect a significant amount of VDI deployments in the world fall into the <5000 users category, so it’s worth a look.

Read more in their press release here.

HopTo

HopTo, who we first became familiar with at BriForum 2015 Denver (check out their sponsored session), is a company that is tough to categorize. On one hand, you can call them a mobile application vendor, and on the other you could call them App Refactoring. Basically, their MAX product makes it easier to use Windows applications on mobile devices by using toolbars with buttons tied to keyboard shortcuts (a feature they call MAXControl). They’ve gone further than that, though, and added in new functionality that solve some of the other challenges of using Windows apps on mobile devices.

• MAXControl allows you to create touch-friendly menus to control the apps.
• MAXEdit is UI-awareness that understands what and where you are editing text. No more pinch zooming and swiping when the soft keyboard comes up.
• MAXCam uses the device’s camera to scan bar codes, QR codes, and photos.
• MAX-IE lets you “mobilize” touch-enable web applications in IE, including applications that use Java, Flash, or Silverlight.

Until Summit, this was all based around RDP, but at Summit, they announced Project Mobilis, which is designed to add the same functionality on top of HDX and XenApp. This is exciting, because while HopTo had an interesting product, the fact that it was limited to RDP was, well, limiting. With the addition of HDX (and who knows…maybe PCoIP later in the year?), more people can take advantage of it.

We’ll have more coverage about HopTo in the coming weeks.

Liquidware Labs

Keeping Application Management in the discussion (which is good, because it appears that there wasn’t any information made public about Citrix AppDisk), Liquidware Labs announced something called “Micro Isolation” in their FlexApp product. As you might guess from the name, Micro Isolation adds back in some of the isolation elements that were removed from this latest generation of application management tools.

Back in olden times, App-V was created just for the purpose of hard core isolation. As time went by and applications were better-behaved, the need for such brute strength dwindled, but we still need some isolation (or just plain trickery) to get certain apps to work together, which is where this comes in.

I have a briefing planned for next week, so check back for more information on FlexApp Micro Isolation. In the meantime, check out our coverage of FlexApp from late last year as part of our Application Layering roundup.

ThinPrint

ThinPrint has created a hardware device, called ThinPrint Hub, which appears to be targeted as a branch-office printing solution that removes the need to install the ThinPrint client or even Windows print servers at branch offices. Details are tough to come by, but the device itself supports networked and USB printers, has the ThinPrint Client installed on it, and can be managed via a web interface. Because it has the ThinPrint Client on it, it supports the certain features like bandwidth control, compression, and data streaming.

I’ll find out more from ThinPrint next week, too (I have a busy week! Maybe I should just go to Summit?)

Bonus Citrix announcement

For many years, customers have been using Comtrade's Citrix Management Packs to give them advanced Citrix management and monitoring from SCOM, allowing them to gauge not only the infrastructure but the end user experience. At Summit, Citrix announced that they had acquired the Citrix Management Packs from Comtrade.

These management packs allow you to monitor XenApp, XenDesktop, NetScaler, StoreFront, Web Interface, PVS, XenMobile, ShareFile, and more from SCOM. They’ll be included as a feature of  Platinum editions of XenApp and XenDesktop (Citrix is always trying to add stuff to that to make the cost justifiable compared to Enterprise). There’s no word yet on whether or not they’ll be available as standalone products as well.

Keep in mind this isn’t Citrix acquiring Comrade. They’re just acquiring the product, and there’s even an agreement with Comtrade for continuing support and development. The time to integrate these Management Packs into the Citrix machine is probably negligible, and Citrix says you can expect to see them available to current Platinum subscribers in Q1.

What did we miss? If something interesting caught your eye, let us know!

Today, I'm happy to share that we've just released all the videos from last year's BriForum conferences. Between BriForum 2015 London and Denver, we produced 83 session videos with more than 100 hours of independent, expert-led content! We do this because we designed BriForum as a community event, and it's important to us to share the content with those in the community that can't attend. Of course, we'd love to see you at BriForum. We believe there isn't another show quite like it, and we're very proud of the quality content, speakers, and attendees that attend. Watching these sessions gives you a great example of the type of content you can expect to find, but if you haven't attended a show you're missing out on all the conversations and networking that occurs.

In 2015, our sessions were as varied as ever, covering all areas of End User Computing including:

• Traditional VDI, SBC, and DaaS
• Storage
• Performance and Troubelshooting
• Enterprise Mobility, MDM, and MAM
  
• Application Virtualization and Management/Layering
  
• App Refactoring
• Mobile Applications and Virtual Mobile Infrastructure
• Browser Management
• Cloud Security and Identity Management
  
• ...and MUCH more!

To get you started, here are links to the top five sessions with the best feedback in 2015:

• Hacking VMware Horizon View (by Mitja Bezenšek from BriForum 2015 London)
  
• The Packet Games: Analytics and Troubleshooting on the Wire (by John Smith and Mike Nelson from BriForum 2015 Denver)
• The App Whisperer–Latest Technologies in Sequencing (by Tim Mangan and Patrick Mangan from BriForum 2015 Denver)
• Cloud Data Security: Separating Fact from Fiction (by Shawn Bass from BriForum 2015 London)
  
• Maximizing Scalability! Understanding and Optimizing the Scalability of VDI and RDS (by Dan Allen and Nick Rintalan from BriForum 2015 Denver)

To see the other 78 videos, head to the BriForum 2015 Videos page. You can also check out our entire back catalog dating back to the original BriForum in 2005. There are more than 1,000 hours of content at your fingertips!

If you like what you see and would like to attend a BriForum event in 2016, we'd absolutely love to see you there! Registration isn't open quite yet, but you can visit BriForum.com and sign up to be notified when it's time.

Happy watching!

Back in December, Liquidware Labs shipped the latest version of the ProfileUnity in late December and announced it at Citrix Summit in late January. The latest version, 6.5.1, includes a few updates like support for Windows 10 and the ability to support side-by-side DLLs in FlexApp.

I learned that one of the challenges Liquidware (and every other UEM vendor) has to deal with is that in Windows 10 the Start Menu isn’t populated the same way as previous OSes where files lived in a hierarchy of folders. In Windows 10, it’s actually a Jet database, which, without getting into the nitty-gritty, means that you can’t easily migrate from one to the other. I’m sure someone will come up with something, but in the meantime “Windows 10 Support,” at least from Liquidware’s perspective, means everything but the Start Menu (though they do support pinned items on the task bar and everything else you’d expect to see from ProfileUnity).

With FlexApp, one of the things they’d been missing that I believe you need to have to be a mature Application Layering product is the ability to automatically resolve certain file/registry/DLL application conflicts. This release adds in a capability they call Micro Isolation to address that.

When applications are installed in a traditional way, they have intelligence to work around conflicts that the installer sees. (Well, good application installers do.) If there is a conflicting DLL, for example, they can install their own copy and route around it. In a normal environment, this works great, but when you compartmentalize applications and bolt them on to an OS, conflicts can arise. Other vendors have the same problem and work around it in different ways (or not at all in some cases).

Liquidware’s approach is to watch as the applications are attached to Windows. When an application is attached, the FlexApp driver (part of the agent) detects any conflicts that the files or registry entries of the new application might introduce. If it detects, say, a DLL conflict, it simply refers any request from the new application back to the DLL in the FlexApp package rather than the one that is already installed with another application.

There is no configuration required to get this feature–it’s just built into the product. When you’ve upgraded to 6.5.1, you’ll immediately begin using it behind the scenes without any additional work. In fact, you might even be able to package apps that would have been troublesome in the past, like individual applications from Adobe’s Creative Suite.

It’s not much of a departure from the other approaches, so I don’t want to oversell this as some sort of revolutionary method of resolving application conflicts. The point here is that for a company to produce a good Application Virtualization product, it needs to have this feature, and ProfileUnity with FlexApp now has that.

VMware apparently did not take much a winter break, because in the past week we’ve seen several huge announcements. This article is going to cover the desktop-related news, but Jack has also written about Workspace One and the new direction it is taking. For this article, we’re going to cover three big things: AppVolumes 3.0, Horizon Air Hybrid Mode (formerly Project Enzo), and Horizon 7. Let’s dig in.

AppVolumes 3.0

AppVolumes 3.0 gets top billing here because the announcement came out last week. VMware, along with the rest of the application management vendors, has been on a mission to simplify application management over the past few years. With this release, VMware addressed many of AppVolumes’ shortcomings and introduced several new features.

The most important addition is AppToggle, which which lets you deliver single applications from an AppStack with that contains multiple apps as opposed to delivering the entire AppStack. If you’re not familiar, an AppStack is a group of applications that you deliver to users. The idea of grouping applications together for delivery is simple enough on paper, but if you only need to deliver a few of the applications in an AppStack to a user, you either had to deliver the entire AppStack anyway or create a new AppStack with just those applications. It’s not hard to see that getting out of control very quickly. AppToggle alleviates the need to carve off apps into new AppStacks by allowing you to turn on/off applications. It doesn’t just hide them, though (VMware thinks this approach can be exploited, which is a topic that I think would make for a GREAT BriForum session!), it actually prevents the application’s files and registry objects from being merged with the base OS until the user is entitled to the application. The end result is fewer AppStacks and easier management.

AppCapture and AppIsolation are also important in this release. AppCapture gives you a way to capture applications individually into their own AppStack, then merge that new AppStack into an existing AppStack later. You can then use AppToggle to control which applications users have access to. When an application is merged into an AppStack with AppCapture (via command line), it looks at the application and the AppStack it wants to merge into and compares their files. If there is a conflict, AppIsolation kicks in to help resolve it. AppIsolation is basically an automated implementation of ThinApp, the big difference being that the isolation is only used when it’s needed, not by default. In the past isolation was the rule, and integration was the exception. AppIsolation spins that around.

The remaining features focus on management across the board, even into other VMware products. AppScaling with Multizones enables you to pair repositories (basically file shares) of AppStacks with different instances of vCenter in different regions, which makes it easier to scale out your applications while providing a consolidated view across all those regions. Integrated App and User Management Platform is a middle API tier that they use to connect the backend to the new Unified Admin Console, which one of the things we got to see at VMworld. All the EUC products will eventually share the same management UI, which will tie back to a powerful backend via the API tier. If you recall Harry Labana speaking about a “cake baking” approach to management, this is the first iteration of that.

AppVolumes 3.0 will be available sometime in Q1 in one of three versions: Standard, which includes UEM and AppVolumes; Advanced, which adds in AppToggle, AppIsolation, and the scalability pieces; and Enterprise, which adds support for vRealize Ops.

Horizon Air with Hybrid Mode (formerly Project Enzo)

Announced today, Horizon Air with Hybrid Mode (which is a mouthful, and HAHM is not the best acronym, so let's just call it "Hybrid Mode" for now), is the long awaited cloud management plane from VMware. While it’s not identical to Citrix Workspace Cloud, it does set out to make it easier to deploy the management components associated with virtual desktops and applications as well as the deployment of the desktops themselves. It leverages select vSAN-ready nodes that are placed on-premises that connect to the Horizon Air with Hybrid Mode service. Admins connect to the service to manage desktop pools, and users connect to it as their broker. Because it’s a cloud service, it’s always up-to-date.

Horizon Air with Hybrid Mode is not intended to work with traditional on-premises Horizon deployments. The service leverages Horizon Air, so if you use that on-premises, you could move your management to Hybrid Mode, but for the moment it seems that this is for net new deployments that use vSAN-ready nodes and HCI appliances. Future releases should see support for cloud services beyond Horizon Air.

Horizon Air with Hybrid Mode retails for $16 per named user, per month ($26 per concurrent user) if you already have licenses for vSphere, vCenter, and vSAN. Those prices assume that you already have VMware virtualization software, but if you don't you can add on a few bucks to the subscription to get them, too (bringing the per-user cost to $18 and $30, respectively). In either case, you'll need to buy the hardware (or Horizon DaaS) to host your desktops. Like AppVolumes, it will be available in March.

You'll note that even at the $18/per user, per month price point, Hybrid Mode is about half the price of Citrix Workspace Cloud. I wrote back in December that Citrix had left a lot of room for VMware to undercut them, and it appears they've done just that. I'm sure Citrix knew this was coming because at Summit they announced that CWC pricing would be reduced, though they didn’t let on what the new pricing would be. I suppose they were waiting to see what VMware would do and what, exactly, would come with the package. Expect to see a new CWC price from Citrix sooner than later.

Horizon 7

Last, but not least, VMware announced Horizon 7, which is also due for release in March. In addition to a tie-in with AppToggle and AppVolumes 3.0, there are two big themes to come out of this announcement: Just in Time desktops and a new, home-grown protocol called Blast Extreme Experience.

Just in Time desktops is the name given to what you may recall as Project Fargo from VMworld 2014. In early August 2015, it was released as a PowerCLI Extension called Instant Clone, but this was more of an early-access experiment than a real product. It works by allowing admins to fork a running virtual machine (called a “Parent VM") rather than taking a full clone. The forked VMs are called Child VMs, and, because of the fact that they are leveraging the memory and disk of the parent VM, they can be created in just a few seconds (or even less in certain scenarios). Each Child VM has it’s own delta from the Parent VM, and you can specify unique settings for each Child VM via a “PostCloneScript.” Because a Child VM was forked from a running VM, there is no boot up. “Powering On” a Child VM makes it instantly accessible. More information on this can be found in the VMware PowerCLI Blog.

Today, we’re finally catching a glimpse of the real deal. With this technology, you can now deploy and update images exceptionally fast without recomposing or re-balancing them. You simply update the master, and the next time a user starts up their machine the changes are there.

The other big news from the Horizon 7 announcement is that VMware has created a new protocol called Blast Extreme Experience. They do NOT call it the BEE protocol, which is good because I can picture all the cheesy marketing right now (Handing out Honey Nut Cheerios at VMworld, Shawn Bass dressing up in a bee costume, etc…). It’s called Blast, and though it may seem like it’s a brand new protocol, it’s something VMware has been working on for several years, tracing its roots at least back to the Horizon View HTML Access protocol from 2013.

VMware developed Blast because they wanted something that could work well from the cloud as well as on-premises, and though PCoIP has done well in both scenarios (well enough, even, for Amazon to use it for AWS Workspaces), they also wanted something that would work well with mobile devices, be more battery friendly, and consume less bandwidth than PCoIP for video. To address those priorities, Blast uses H.264, which is already optimized for video and has hardware-based decoders on just about every piece of hardware you can think of, which gives them the battery life they were looking for as well as the ability to work on very inexpensive thin clients. With regards to battery life, according to VMware, users can work twice as long using Blast as they can with PCoIP on the same device.

Blast uses UDP by default, but falls back to TCP if needed. With UDP, they can handle 20% packet loss and still present a reasonable user experience. (That’s subjective, of course, but it does show that VMware considers this a modern protocol for use on the LAN, WAN or on mobile networks.) There are no feature gaps between Blast and PCoIP. It supports MMR, USB device, Client Drive Redirection, and all the other features you’d expect. Deploying Blast amounts to an extra check box when setting up a Desktop Pool and selecting the protocol to use by default. Older clients that don’t support Blast will simply fall back to PCoIP or RDP.

Wrap-up

I’m not sure what this means for the relationship between VMware and Teradici, though I’m inclined to think nothing will change in the near future. I’ll be curious to see how the performance of both protocols compare in the real world before making any judgments. I do, however, think that it was only a matter of time until VMware made their protocol. Overall, though, I think it’s a non-issue at this point.

The changes made to AppVolumes are critical given how the App Layering space is evolving. They’ve done a good job of expanding the platform without adding back in the same kind of complexity we’ve had for the last 15 years. Even the AppIsolation component only isolates files/registry entries if it has to, rather than by default, and the fact that it does it in a hands-off way is critical.

It’s too early to tell whether or not Horizon Air with Hybrid Mode will be successful, but in general I think we’re looking at the future of virtual desktop and application management, just as I do with Citrix Workspace Cloud. They are both taking different approaches, targeting different classes of users, but it’s interesting to watch as it all evolves. If you’re just getting started with VDI, though, it makes a lot of sense, especially if you consider that you’re starting with Horizon 7.

After a solid week of sorting through Call for Papers submissions, we're finally ready to announce the list of sessions for both BriForum 2016 London! We say this every year, but when the selection process is all over and we step back to survey the agendas, we just can't believe how awesome these shows are! You can read a more detailed version of the selection process here, but in general we do at least five passes over the submissions. The first is blind, just looking at titles and abstracts (no speaker names). From there, we go through speaker names, previous ratings, content areas, physical location, and which shows they want to present at. It's exhaustive, but the end result is something we're very proud of. We take the selection process very seriously, and we're extremely grateful to everyone that donated their time and energy to submit!

As usual, we wanted to choose way more sessions than we could actually fit into both shows, so we focused our efforts on having as many unique sessions as possible between both shows. Since we record every session, and since all you have to do is attend one BriForum to get access to both show's session videos, this lets us have as many of these unbelieveable sessions as possible. After the first of the year, we then open those sessions up to the public. In fact, you can check out the BriForum 2015 videos right now!

Here's the list of sessions. Keep in mind, titles may change to be more descriptive, but the content of the sessions won't. Also note that there will be sessions from Brian, Jack, and I that aren't on this list mainly because we tailor our sessions based on the other content at a show. For more information on BriForum, visit BriForum.com. We should have session descriptions posted shortly. You can also see the list of BriForum 2016 Boston sessions here.

The hardest week of our year, selecting BriForum sessions, is over, and we're finally ready to announce the list of sessions for both BriForum 2016 Boston! Once again, we are blown away by the number of quality submissions to pick from, and we can't wait to see it all come together July 26-28.

You can read a more detailed version of the selection process here, but in general we do at several passes over the submissions. The first is blind, just looking at titles and abstracts (no speaker names). From there, we go through speaker names, previous ratings, content areas, physical location, and which shows they want to present at. It's exhaustive, but we take the selection process very seriously, and we're extremely grateful to everyone that donated their time and energy to submit!

As usual, we wanted to choose way more sessions than we could actually fit into both shows, so we focused our efforts on having as many unique sessions as possible between both shows. Don't worry if you see a session at one show that isn't at the one you can attend! We record every session and let attendees of one show view the sessions from both shows after they're posted. You can get a taste of what to expect by checking out last year's videos, which we opened up to the community earlier this year.

Here's the list of sessions. Keep in mind, titles may change to be more descriptive, but the content of the sessions won't. Also note that there will be sessions from Brian, Jack, and I that aren't on this list mainly because we tailor our sessions based on the other content at a show. For more information on BriForum, visit BriForum.com. We should have session descriptions posted shortly. You can also see the list of BriForum 2016 London sessions here.

Back in December, I wrote that Citrix’s seemingly outrageous price tag on Citrix Workspace Cloud left room for VMware to significantly undercut them when they finally released Enzo. In January, Citrix announced they were going to reduce CWC pricing, but stopped short of actually saying what that price would be, presumably waiting for more intel from VMware. Now that Enzo has dropped in the form of Horizon Air with Hybrid Mode, Citrix has adjusted their pricing accordingly, though not as much as you might think.

Let’s back up for a minute. From its launch, Citrix Workspace Cloud has been the only platform like it on the market, and Citrix priced it based on the fact that there was no competition. There are three “Packages” of CWC:

• Virtual Desktops
• Virtual Apps and Desktops
• Integrated Apps and Data Suite

Comparing those packages to Citrix’s traditional on-prem product line, Virtual Desktops is essentially on par with XenDesktop VDI Edition, Virtual Apps and Desktops is most similar to XenDesktop Enterprise, and Integrated Apps and Data Suite is closest to Citrix Workspace Suite because it includes all the mobility components as well as ShareFile.

The most common product I run into is XenDesktop Enterprise, and if we compare the pricing of that to CWC Virtual Apps and Data, you can start to see a rather large gap. XenDesktop Enterprise retails for $116/user on a yearly subscription license, or just under $10/month per user. Prior to the pricing adjustment, CWC Virtual Apps and Data cost $35/month per user–$25 MORE PER USER than XenDesktop. Sure, there are added costs that Citrix absorbs by hosting the management infrastructure in the cloud, but I found it hard to believe that that hit worked out to $25/month per user.

When VMware released Horizon Air with Hybrid Mode, they called Citrix’s bluff and released it for $18/month per named user ($16 if you already had a vSAN entitlement). Advanced math shows that’s nearly half the price of CWC Apps and Data, and as Rob Beekmans pointed out in his blog post comparing the two products, Hybrid Mode’s price includes UEM and AppVolumes.

(You might say that CWC gives you EMM and ShareFile, but that’s another pricing tier. Since I’m trying to keep this as apples to apples of a comparison as possible, we’re sticking with the Virtual Apps and Desktops package)

Armed with VMware’s pricing, Citrix turned around and slashed CWC’s prices. In the case of the Virtual Apps and Desktops package, they found their way back into the ballpark by lowering the price to $22.50/month per user. It’s still quite a bit higher, than both VMware and the monthly license for XenDesktop Enterprise, though, so what gives?

Honestly, this is probably about saving face more than anything else. If Citrix lowered their price all the way down to $18 to match VMware, customers would feel like they’d been fleeced for the past year. Lowering pricing just enough to get it in the same conversation (and allow room to wiggle on larger deals) allows them to stay competitive until they make some sort of “breakthrough” (wink wink) on their end that makes their infrastructure cheaper.

That ignores the other part of the conversation, though. The gap between CWC pricing and on-premises XenDesktop pricing, though more favorable, very much remains. The ~$10/month per user XenDesktop Enterprise license still clocks in at $12.50/month cheaper than CWC. Is it worth $12.50/month per user to have Citrix take the management off your plate? Remember, CWC doesn’t come with a DaaS desktop or any other desktop container–you have to get that just as you would have to with XenDesktop. (For the record, Hybrid Mode doesn’t come with a desktop container either.)

VMware hasn’t published a monthly subscription price for Horizon View, so it’s hard to make the same comparison with them. I can imagine that there’s a healthy margin for them, though, too.

So, what’s this all mean? I’m not concerned that vendors are charging more while providing a service that takes a lot of pain and suffering off the plates of IT. Companies should be willing to pay for that. I just find it interesting that when you compare the differences in the prices of doing it yourself or letting someone else handle it, the numbers can be quite large. A 500-person company would spend $5,000/month buying XenDesktop Enterprise, and $11,250 by using CWC, and neither of those prices includes a desktop! Sure, to do it on-premises you have to buy hardware and keep it up to date, but that doesn’t cost anywhere near $6,000/month. VMware’s pricing ($9,000/mo) is much more conducive to getting companies to say “Meh…let’s just let them handle it.”

I think we’ll see some more price adjustments over the next year as Citrix and VMware compete. Both platforms will likely inch closer to each other in terms of capabilities as time goes by, and as that happens price will become a key differentiator. Until then VMware is in the driver’s seat with the lowest price, not to mention the addition of UEM and AppVolumes, and will probably remain that way until Citrix feels its customers won’t get angry at another price drop. While all that plays out, you have a decision to make: How much is it worth to you to have VMware or Citrix take the virtual desktop management infrastructure off your plate?

Mucking about in the nether-regions of twitter this week, I ran across a few tweets about how Citrix Melio has been shut down. Visiting Citrix’s product lifecycle matrix shows that it was placed into the End of Sale state on January 15 of this year, with both End of Maintenance and End of Life happening on June 30, 2016.

Well that was fast.

The announcement came at Citrix Summit (which is an NDA event, but leaks happen when you have 2,000 people with twitter machines in their pockets), coincidentally almost a year to the day after Citrix announced that they’d acquired Sanbolic. Frankly, the writing was on the wall with this move, and it happened for what is likely a number of reasons. From the beginning, the acquisition itself was sort of strange. Citrix users liked Melio for a specific use case surrounding Provisioning Server, but there wasn’t any other direct tie between the two companies.

As soon as the acquisition was announced, we started hearing about how Melio was one of the technologies behind WorkspacePOD, which was primarily a collaboration between Citrix and HP leveraging Moonshot hardware to create a converged appliance for desktop delivery (there was also a reference architecture for other vendors to create their own appliances). This never took off, and frankly it kind of felt like a halfhearted attempt to keep their name in the conversation with VMware’s vSAN and EVO:RACK, both of which were generating a lot of buzz at the time.

Still, the hope was that Citrix would take the technology and grow it into something useful, not necessarily to compete with VMware (whose products go beyond supporting desktop virtualization), but to make storage optimization, management, and virtualization a part of the Citrix platform. Customers, faced with the prospect of having to immediately go out and find a third party solution, would have responded to that.

The final sentence for Melio was probably written in mid-2015 when Citrix started parting itself out at the behest of Elliott Management. In November, they specifically mentioned WorkspacePOD as a “non-core” product, and it (along with Podio and Startup Accelerator) would be “wound down” (not sold or spun off, just…gone). Since Melio is one of the underlying technologies in WorkspacePOD, it stands to reason that Melio wasn’t far behind.

So what’s a company to do?

Fortunately, there is no shortage of products in the storage virtualization space. Here’s a slide I use when talking about it during our Modern End User Computing event series:

(I count 18, but I'm sure I left someone out)

No two of these vendors have identical approaches, even if the hardware they sell happens to be the same. The secret sauce in the software, and so there will likely never be a shortage of options for optimizing storage for desktop virtualization workloads. (I realize the irony of that, given the fact that three or four years ago this kind of thing was unthinkable.)

If you were a Melio customer, I feel bad that you have to go on a search for a new platform just a year after Citrix acquired Sanbolic. That said, I do think this is the right move for Citrix. Why divert resources to building/maintaining/selling a product that has so much competition outside of Citrix’s core competency when those resources would be better off used to bolster core components like XenApp, XenDesktop, and XenServer. In fact, though Melio may be gone, some of the tech could find its way into these other products, and that’s fine by me.

Over the past year I’ve had a number of conversations with HopTo, but for some reason I haven’t written about them yet on BrianMadden.com. That ends today! HopTo has been around in one form or another since the late 1990’s, and you may have come across them (if you’re older than 35) as Graphon GoGlobal around that time. In 2013, Graphon changed their name to HopTo, and rebranded to focus on “mobile productivity solutions.” (Graphon GoGlobal is still around, if you’re wondering.)

HopTo’s approach to mobile productivity is something I would stop short of calling “app refactoring,” but it’s hard to come up with another term that’s as concise. Where traditional app-refactoring platforms (can there be such a thing this early?!) focus on creating a new, mobile-friendly interface for desktop applications, HopTo aims to preserve the overall UI that users are accustomed to (they leverage RDP and, soon, HDX) and add mobile friendly features. For the most part, these features revolve around linking a touch-friendly menu to keyboard shortcuts that are built into an application, but there are other enhancements as well that really help the user experience. 

Features

The main feature of the MAX platform, MAX Control, allows you to take menu operations that use keyboard shortcuts and map them to a toolbar that is overlaid onto the user interface. This toolbar is customizable (via a control panel app called MAX Editor) and can contain three tiers of menu items or activities. Any more than three and it would take up too much of the UI.

You can read a short walkthrough of how to create custom toolbars here.

MAX also includes some intelligence about what you’re trying to do with an application. One feature, MAXCam, allows you to use the mobile device’s camera to enter barcodes, QR codes, and photos. A shortcut button brings up the app’s “Scan barcode” dialog, then pops up the camera and uses the built-in barcode reading functionality in your device’s camera to read and place the barcode data in the form.

Another feature called MAXEdit makes editing text more intuitive. When tapping in a text entry field using a typical remote desktop client, the best you can hope for is that the client understands that you want to type something and brings up the soft keyboard. Even when that happens, more often then not the keyboard covers up the cursor, so you still have to swipe around or zoom to actually see what you’re typing. MAX Control not only pulls up the keyboard, but also centers the cursor in the visible portion of the app so you don’t have to.

Other MAX features include:

• Users have the ability to tie their cloud storage accounts into HopTo, allowing them to open documents stored in those locations in their HopTo-published application.
• Image insertion into documents can automatically pull from a Google image search
• Intuitive, easy multitasking between applications (no disconnecting to switch or any of that nonsense)

You can watch a video comparing the traditional RDP client experience to the HopTo experience here. In it, you'll also see the process of setting up toolbars for an application.

Coming Soon: MAX IE

MAX IE, due in Q2, uses a virtual channel to send down HTML straight from IE, which is then rendered by Safari (well, WebKit), so the browser app is rendered in native controls rather than remoted down via RDP or ICA. By letting IE render the page and then taking that output and sending it as HTML to the client, dynamic content, including things like Flash, Java, and Silverlight also works on the mobile device.

When a user enters the information it’s posted back into IE on the backend, so from an application perspective, it’s as if nothing is different at all, but from the users’ perspective it looks as if the web-app has been mobilized.

Coming Soon: Project Mobilis

You may have heard the news around Citrix Summit that HopTo had announced Project Mobilis. Until recently, MAX only worked when used in conjunction with applications accessed via RDP. With Mobilis, HopTo has partnered with Citrix to extend MAX functionality to HDX. I have not seen a release date for this, but I do know that HopTo is planning on demonstrating Mobilis at Citrix Synergy, so you can probably expect a release in Q2 as well.

Pricing

HopTo Work perpetual licenses retail for $99/named user or $149/concurrent. You can also subscribe monthly for $6.99/named user or $10.99/concurrent. HopTo Personal, which is aimed towards one-off users for accessing remote PCs from mobile devices, is available in the iOS app store.

Wrap-up

What sets HopTo apart is that while most of the other app refactoring platforms are best suited for forms-based, data entry applications, HopTo also works well for certain types of content creation. You’re not going to edit videos with Premiere, but it does make it easier to use productivity apps like Office. On the other hand, if your app looks like it was made in the 1900’s and has an interface that was made by a developer in a way that is only intuitive to a developer, you might want the full-on app refactoring platform.

Either way, there are options, and those options are not mutually exclusive of each other. The fact that we’re seeing this kind of diversity is indicative of the market having problems that need to be addressed. I wonder which way will prevail, or what mixture of features will finally be the one to beat. For more information, you can view HopTo CEO Eldad Eilam’s booth demo from BriForum 2015 on HopTo.com.

Last week I had the opportunity to talk to Parallels about what the company has been up to, specifically with regards to Parallels Remote Application Server (formerly 2X Remote Application Server). Parallels bought 2X just over a year ago, and since then they’ve been making strides modernizing the platform and fitting it into the Parallels ecosystem.

Before we start, let’s take a look at the aforementioned Parallels ecosystem. As Parallels has grown, they’ve split off a number of their core products into different companies. Last year, they renamed their service provider business to Odin and subsequently sold it to Ingram Micro, as well as wrapped their web hosting automation products up under the brand name Plesk. This year, they spun off Virtuozzo into its own company. All this activity is more or less off our radar, though, and Parallels remains the name of the company that is doing desktop virtualization, MDM, and OS X management through SCCM integration.

With regards to desktop virtualization, Parallels has a few offerings:

• Parallels Desktop for Mac (They hypervisor we all know and love)
• Parallels Desktop for Mac Business Edition (The enterprise version of the same hypervisor with more manageability and provisioning)
• Parallels MDM
• Parallels Mac Management for SCCM
• Parallels Remote Application Server
• Parallels Access

Parallels has had their Access product for a few years now, and while I loved the UI when it was released, it wasn’t the kind of product that I would use as my daily driver. It appears I’m not alone in that sentiment, because Parallels noted the same feedback from their customers. That doesn’t mean it’s not useful, but for Parallels to dig their heels into the remote application delivery world, they needed something more.

At first, they began to develop their own platform to deliver apps from servers. After they started, though, they made the decision to buy 2X rather than go through the effort of releasing a v1 product in a world dominated by Citrix, VMware, Microsoft, and Dell. You could argue they’re still being dominated, but the margin is significantly less than if they started from nothing.

Comparing Parallels Remote Application Server to XenApp, Horizon, RDS, or vWorkspace is a little unfair, though, because Parallels isn’t going after the same market. They know that if you’re a large, up-to-date Citrix or VMware customer that you’re not likely to be sold on a platform migration, so they’re targeting customers with older Citrix or RDS deployments that are in need of an upgrade, but are unwilling to spend the money it would take or go through the migration to get themselves up to speed. Based on conversations I’ve had with people in the last year, I’m certain that’s a large market!

What's new in v15?

If you’re at all familiar with the 2X product line, you’ll know that the product itself was pretty straightforward. They had a broker that supports VDI and RDSH workloads, load balancing and high availability, some reporting, clients for various platforms, and peripheral redirection. But while Remote Application Server was a functional product, using and administering it wasn’t pretty, and Parallels has spent the time since the acquisition cleaning up the admin interface and adding some features.

Version 15, which is out now, includes an HTML5 client in addition to the existing native clients, which include Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, and ChromeOS. In the next release (v15.1, coming around May), they’ll be adding support for the Parallels Access Mobile Client, which will really help mobile user experience. 

In addition to the clients, they’ve focused on making the overall product easier to setup and manage. They’ve added features like Smart Card redirection, URL publishing, and localized languages for the clients and admin interface. Installing PRAS on a server can be done from the PRAS Console simply be selecting a server from a list (it already has to have RDSH installed) and following a wizard. Adding users is as easy as sending them an email from the admin console that contains a link to download the client or to the HTML5 page.

They’ve also built in a feature called Centralized Hard Drives, which gives users a single location from which to access all of their files across multiple storage platforms. It looks like a typical file share to the users, and can currently aggregate data from file shares, Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and SharePoint, with more platforms coming in the future.

Eval & Pricing

Parallels has an evaluation that you can download. They say it takes about two hours to get up and running, so you can do it some afternoon when you’re bored. It will run in Parallels Desktop even, and can place all the components on a single machine for testing purposes. It will even install alongside XenApp on the same server, so you could put it on your existing environment and see how it performs (I mean, if you were playing it fast and loose with your job…maybe do that in your lab). It supports Server 2003 through Server 2012, though support for Server 2003 will be pulled sooner than later. 

Finally, Parallels Remote Application Server is licensed on a subscription basis for $99 per concurrent user, per year. Discounts are available for multi-year purchases, and existing customers can upgrade for $49 per concurrent user, per year. Competitive upgrade pricing is also available. There is no perpetual license, though I’m sure if you said that was a deal-breaker they might be able to work something out. 

Wrap-up

Is there room for another SMB-oriented desktop virtualization platform in the world? vWorkspace is often marketed that way (though I whole-heartedly believe it shouldn’t be), and the other players in that space are still around, too, like Ericom, DesktopSites, ProPalms, and even Jetro. The thing is, this isn’t a new product. 2X used to be in that list, and now they’re just part of Parallels. That means they have Parallels' resources behind them, which already shows in the updates they made in v15. They’re not trying to outdo the feature set offered by Citrix and VMware, but they are focused on making an easy to use desktop virtualization platform with modern features. That, combined with the fact that it meshes well with the rest of the Parallels product line, leads me to believe they can be successful.

We don’t often think about Leostream, which is something that should change. They’re a quiet company…not very splashy, but very good at what they do. Brian once wrote, though I can’t find it, that Leostream is like BASF – They don’t make a lot of the products you buy…they make a lot of the products you buy better – and that holds true today.

If you’re not familiar with Leostream, think of their primary product this way: It’s connection broker to end all connection brokers. They don’t do image management, they don’t do UEM, and they don’t do software-defined anything. All they do is manage desktops and users across any platform and any protocol.

“Any protocol?” you ask? Yes, including some you’ve probably never heard of:

• Citrix HDX and ICA
• Colorado Code Craft
• HP Remote Graphics Software (RGS)
• Microsoft RDP andRemoteFX
• Mechdyne teleGraphix (TGX)
• NICE Desktop Cloud Visualization (DCV)
• NoMachine and Free NX
• OpenText Exceed onDemand
• rdesktop
• Red Hat SPICE
• Teradici PCoIP
• VNC (RealVNC, TigerVNC, TightVNC, and UltraVNC)

Many of these protocols are extremely specialized, used in the scientific, medical, high finance, or oil & gasoline industries. Others are old-fashioned, used because “that’s what we’ve always used,” or because that’s all that’s supported on a given platform. To Leostream, it doesn’t matter. In fact, they add functionality around the protocol if it comes up short in, say, the management category. There is no concept of desktop pools when you install TightVNC, but when you add Leostream, now you can build an entire virtual desktop environment around it (if you’re into that sort of thing).

Of course, if you have a platform like Citrix XenDesktop/XenApp or VMware Horizon, you can use Leostream with that, too. Actually, you can use it with both at the same time so your users have a single point of access (a feature that holds true for any combination of platforms/protocols/users).

The Leostream platform consists of a Connection Broker, Leostream Agent, and Leostream Connect:

• The Broker: Maintains an inventory of desktops, apps, and other resources that can be assigned to users.
• The Agent: Installed on the remote desktops (Linux or Windows) and facilitates communications with the broker as well as additional functionality (USB redirection, printing, etc…).
• Leostream Connect: The client application that’s installed on existing desktops. It’s also available on certain thin clients. It doesn’t have any protocol support built in, but it hooks into other client software packages with native support for each protocol.

Within the Connection Broker, you configure “Centers,” which is their term for the different platforms you can connect to. The platforms they support are:

• HPE Moonshot
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager
• VMware vSphere, ESXi, and vCenter
• Citrix XenServer, XenApp, and XenDesktop
• OpenStack
• Open-source Xen
• SCVMM
• RDS
• Active Directory
• LeoStream Cloud Desktops

It’s pretty obvious what Leostream has done, given the wide range of platforms and protocols they support. They’ve created a layer above all the platforms we know and use, that even plugs into those platforms and allows you to connect and manage them all. For example, their Citrix Studio agent allows you to create and manage desktop pools from Leostream’s interface instead of popping back and forth between management consoles.

The flexibility this adds to your environment is immediately recognizable when you consider that you can now manage and broker desktop connections between fundamentally different desktop pools in the cloud and on-premises. Post-merger companies that run more than one platform/protocol can create a single point for users to connect from that seamlessly routes them to the appropriate applications. You can even pick and choose which protocol a user receives based upon location. For example, maybe HP RGS is the way to go locally, but on the WAN RemoteFX makes more sense.

Leostream has many other capabilities that are too numerous to get into detail on, but you can probably imagine what some of them are. There is a robust policy engine that allows you to control such low-level things as power cycling and which protocol to use, all the way up the stack to user experience elements like printers and USB redirection.

The future for Leostream

Back in 2009, Brian wrote an article asking “How does Leostream still exist?” where he wondered aloud if there were too many connection brokers to keep Leostream in business. This was at a time at the dawn of VDI when the term “Connection Broker” was new, and it seemed like everyone was doing what Leostream had been doing for years.

Seven years have passed, and Leostream is still going strong in large part because nobody else does exactly what they do. Not every company needs Leostream, but the ones that do surely benefit from the additional flexibility and manageability. In recent years, Leostream has even extended their product to work with OpenStack, supporting cloud-based desktops and architectures that can be leveraged by individual companies or service providers. This OpenStack support is the foundation of their DaaS platform (which has been around since 2011, long before Amazon or pre-Desktone VMware got in the game).

Additionally, Leostream doesn’t really compete with VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, or any other platform vendor (at least from a connection broker perspective). Rather, they work with them when developing their products and helping customers. The biggest challenge for them is likely to be convincing companies to spend more money on Leostream’s platform in addition to the one they already bought (Though let’s face it, if you need Leostream, you’re probably happy to spend the money).

So the future looks bright for LeoStream. Their flexibility is their biggest asset, and fragmentation is their friend. For more information or to take a deeper look at the inner workings of Leostream, check out their website. Their product documentation page has an enormous amount of information about how their product works.

I recently saw an article about how Windows Vista was going to reach its End of Life next April, which led me to look into the EOL dates for other products that we deal with on a daily basis. While I know you can go get this information on your own, I decided to collect what I found and post it here. EOL dates aren’t something everyone pays attention to, and they have a habit of sneaking up on us. After all, two years ago when we were fighting to get off of Windows XP (April 8, 2014 will be stuck in my brain forever!), we looked at the expiration date of Windows 7 (January 14, 2020) and thought “That’s an eternity!” Now it’s less than four years away, which means we’re two years away from hardcore planning to migrate.

So with that in mind, let this serve as a Public Service Announcement for product lifecycles that we care about. Each company calls their End Of Life something else, it seems, so the date you see here is the date that the product will cease to be supported in any “free” way (but I’m sure if you’re willing to pay you can get bespoke support forever). Of course, any of this can change, so this article itself has an End of Life date of April 13, 2016.

This isn't really intended to be comprehensive, and other vendor timelines are harder to find, so if you have your own timeline to share please leave them in the comments.

Microsoft

By far the most important day for us in the Microsoft section is January 14, 2020, which will see the end of Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 R2. January 10, 2023 is a close second, but since Windows 8 isn't as pervasive as Windows 7, it's not as big of a deal across the enterprise. If there's something not on this list, you can look it up here.

Citrix

There's a lot to take in here because there are so many products and versions that are still supported. Products with an asterisk (*) are being discontinued altogether. I didn't include NetScaler because I think I'd run out of room listing out model numbers, but you can check the page directly if you want to know EOL info for them. June 30, 2018 is a red letter day since anything released prior to XenApp/XenDesktop 7.6 LTS reaches it's end (with VDA support continuing for some time thereafter).

It's important to note that there are four EOLs this year, as well.

VMware

I thought Citrix had a lot to keep track of, but it turns out VMware leads the pack in terms of dates to watch. VMware handles things a little differently by ending support for products before they enter a phase of "Technical Guidance." During Technical Guidance (which I only noted when a product had already reached end of support), no telephone support, updates, or patches are provided. Because of this, I treated the End of General Support phase as the End of Life for a specific product version. You can see more information in VMware's Product Lifecycle PDF.

Complete Timeline

Since I had the sortable data, I figured I'd put it all into one list. Remember, if you're reading this in 2017, something has almost certainly changed!