A couple of weeks ago I launched the first ever ‘The state of public cloud services – the 2016 community edition’ online survey. It included a short textual introduction followed by 35 questions in total and a few fun ‘quotes’ in between. While it turned out to be a bit more work then I anticipated beforehand, I am very satisfied with the final outcome. Below you will find the final report in a .PDF format, free for everyone to download.
13 reasons that MIGHT prevent companies from successfully leveraging public cloud services
Cloud computing seems to be the holy grail, at least that is the impression I get when I scroll down my Linked-in and Twitter timelines. Don’t get me wrong, like everybody else I’m also excited about everything that is going on around ‘the cloud’ and the potential it brings to the table, never mind the type of public cloud service used. I mean, no upfront investments, flexibility, burst capacity (up and downscaling) at our fingertips, ease of management and maintenance and so on, what’s not to like? But, ‘the cloud’ is also just getting started, it isn’t ‘mature’ and/or seen as proven technology by many – there are still a bunch of reasons why companies might wait to leverage (public) cloud computing in general, go hybrid or perhaps won’t join the cloud movement at all, at least not for the first couple of years. I just wanted to put this out there and see what you guys think.
XenApp Express replaces Microsoft Azure RemoteApp – the facts so far
During the past week there has been a lot of excitement around the recent announcements regarding Azure RemoteApp being replaced by, what is now temporary called Citrix XenApp Express. Throughout this blog post I’d like to summarize what we know so far.
Citrix… What they’re missing or might need to work on. Just thinking out loud here.
During the last year or so I had couple of interesting discussions (trough CUGC, Twitter, real life etc.) on what Citrix might need to do from a business and application development perspective. Perhaps sell some of their products, reinvent, recode or reinvest in existing technology, innovate (which they’re doing) perhaps buy another company and so on and so forth. Of course it’s always easy to judge or come up with comments like these being a so-called sideline critic, but it’s not my intention to be the ‘wise guy’ here, I’m just thinking out loud, that is all.
What happens in Vegas… Goes on basvankaam.com Citrix Summit 2015 exposed!
I’m not in Las Vegas and I wasn’t able to catch the Summit Keynote live stream on the partner channel, honestly, I didn’t see a thing. All I could do was keep a close eye on my Twitter feed, which I did (so no NDA for me). Luckily it worked out pretty well. I’m sure I don’t have all the ins and outs and there are probably a few announcements that I’ve missed, those in Vegas will have some more detailed information I’m sure, but that doesn’t stop me from sharing what I did found out. It’s no secret that Citrix published most of the, if not all, major announcements on their website before, during and after the keynote session, although, it wasn’t all on there… read on.
Presenting Citrix XenApp 7.6 & Citrix XenDesktop 7.6… What’s new?!
Hi everybody, as you might have heard by now Citrix announced XenApp and XenDesktop version 7.6 build on top of the their new and improved Flexcast Management Architecture. I took the liberty to summarize some, if not all, of the newly announced features and enhancements that both products will bring to the table, sparing you the marketing propaganda surrounding it. If you feel I left anything out, drop me a line and I’ll include it, and of course this goes for the Citrix employees as well :-) Here goes:
Google Chromebooks, where do they fit in?
Google Chromebooks are beyond new, but although they’ve been on the market for a few years, it seems that 2013 has finally been the year of their ‘big’ breakthrough. The everlasting cloud hype combined with their low pricing and simplicity, make that Chromebooks are now being adopted faster than ever, and with good reason if you ask me. They just needed some time to warm up I guess. I agree, they’re not for everyone, and if we look at them from a business perspective use cases are still limited. So where do they fit in?
Citrix Summit 2014… What a ride!
When I first heard that my request to go Citrix Summit in Orlando Florida, about three and a half months ago, got approved I couldn’t be happier. I mean going to a three day conference with non stop, back to back high quality, technical and pre-sales / partner orientated sessions is awesome on its own (it really is). But when it’s organized by Citrix, celebrating their 25th anniversary, you know you’re in for something special! As the event date got closer my expectations began to rise, and when the time finally came I wasn’t disappointed. In fact, I can honestly say that looking back the whole experience was even better than I hoped it would be!
What to do at Citrix Summit 2014?! Here’s my agenda.
Citrix Summit 2014 in Orlando Florida is approaching fast. Just a few more weeks before the Welcome Reception, including the Solutions Expo, at the Hyatt Regency (Regency Ballroom) officially kicks off next years Summit event. Since I don’t like last minute arrangements I took some time to figure out what I need to take with me, MacBook, paper notebook, clothing (I’m counting on 80F, around 26 celsius, average :-) hotel voucher, tickets, passport etc… stuff like that. About a month ago I also figured out my conference schedule, the opening key-note, multiple break-out sessions, the Expo, perhaps a walk-in hands-on session and I also scheduled the 1Y0-400 exam to, hopefully, earn my CCE-AD certification. See my full schedule further on, I fine tuned it last week.
Desktop as a Service a.k.a. DaaS
This article was originally written as a guest blogger for Intense School IT educational services. During the past few weeks I repeatedly talk about virtual desktop infrastructures (XenDesktop, VDI-in-a-Box), some of the technology involved, features and probably the most important one, use cases. Especially with Windows XP coming to an end, see my previous article on this, this might be a good time to rethink your alternatives when it comes to replacing your (fat) client infrastructure and the accompanying back-end systems that come with it. That being said, there’s another concept I’d like to discuss since it’s closely related to VDI and could prove to be a valid solution for a great deal of use cases out there, especially when it comes to small(er) and mid sized companies. I’m referring to DaaS, or, Desktop as a Service in full.