Citrix Synergy 2015 – The Software-Defined Workspace Drives Output Innovation Xangati Blog Atchison Frazer Vice President, Marketing
May 21, 2015
Xangati Blog How do you define where and how you work? Is it the physical environment, such as the office or company setting, what you’re connected to or what physical equipment you have at your fingertips, running numerous heavy applications on each appliance? Or is it more likely to be defined by the way in which you interact with applications and communicate with other people, for example, via personalized mobile or cloud environments, wireless access to any application on demand when you may only need a composite for a short duration? During last week’s Citrix Synergy 2015 event in Orlando, it was clear Citrix is placing a big bet on the virtual or “software-defined” workspace. What are some of the customer and computing trends driving the shift to the virtual “workspace” that will make the concept of “workplace” passé? The consumerization of IT is an obvious one; that is, the drive and desire by workers to have as good as if not better IT experience at work compared to home or on a smartphone. Closely related is the BYOD movement, that is to embrace consumerization with your own device of choice, and both trends driven in large part by generational shifts in attitudes about what defines where, how and with what we do work. Many of these attitudinal changes are driven also by a desire to have flexible work styles and incorporate more globalized resources as seamlessly as possible.
Xangati Blog The virtual workspace will require proper security and compliance controls, and have redundancies built in to avoid circuit disruptions and maintain business continuity, which is why robust infrastructure performance management will no doubt play a key role in accelerating deployments. The key to enabling the virtual workspace is solving the more complex IT mobility issues: a plethora of different classes of applications; risk of data leakage and movement; and lack of systems interoperability.
Citrix promulgated the view last week that the best solution is to run your virtual workspace in a cloud-based universal container that brokers any application to any device to any network or cloud, with all the necessary supporting services automatically orchestrated in sort of a service-chaining type fashion. One of the interesting use cases is the amount of cost savings and productivity gains a company in the energy exploration sector, which for example is naturally disparate with lots of assets and people in the field working in remote, severe conditions – with a growing interest in BYOD empowerment, whereby conventional MDM (machine device management) solutions present too many administrative headaches, Citrix virtual workspace offered a universal app-mobility-device solution.
Xangati Blog It is also a great illustration of why the underlying IT infrastructure performance, whether it’s premise or hybrid-cloud, to a user scenario as complicated as ensuring that not only the end-user experience is superior with individual choice and flexibility but also to prevent potential degradation issues, such as jitter or frame-delay of applications that transfer large sets of geophysical data across borders and oceans. Energy exploration involves great risk taking and large capital investments up front with no guarantees. One part of the risk equation that can be mitigated in advance is leveraging an infrastructure performance management tool like Xangati, to beta-test the virtual workspace IT environment to ensure that it’s optimized even before the first drill bit hits that ground, so there’s little chance of application performance degradation when the first set of business critical data need to be shared.
Xangati Blog Given Xangati’s ability to provide 300 times the granularity of its nearest competitor in terms of application service assurance, it’s easy to see why infrastructure performance management will be a key component to successfully deploying a virtual workspace environment with Citrix XenApp, XenDesktop and NetScaler. With Xangati, you will be able to track and measure such service assurance analytics as: improved mobile worker productivity (application latency); extensibility of mobile user community (agentless monitoring); and increased field worker efficiency (system reliability).
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