Will Cloud Computing Change the Application Landscape

A couple of weeks ago I was speaking at a German cloud and virtualization conference, dominated by attendees working at Internet Service Providers and physical datacenters. There were many sessions about cloud computing, but speakers were also covering topics like datacenter climate control and energy efficiency improvements. It is interesting to note, that there were speakers from Amazon, Google, IBM, and Dell, but not from Microsoft, VMware or Citrix. As a consequence, desktop virtualization and application remoting enjoyed only very limited attention at this event.

But still, there were some interesting statements a majority of speakers and attendees agreed to.

• There is a massive influence from Internet communities and social networks when looking at future business application concepts.
• There are successful examples for business apps delivered through cloud services, such as Salesforce.
• Consumers influence enterprise user, meaning that there is a shift towards user-orientation in contrast to the past notion of technology driving application development. This implies that user demands are getting more important than technical capabilities. More features is not necessarily better anymore.

This all culminated in the generally accepted statement that conventional Windows applications will disappear during the next five years. A majority of speakers and attendees shared the opinion that ALL Windows apps will be replaced by web apps, Google apps, Adobe Flash and Silverlight by the end of this 5-year period. During a panel discussion, I was the only person on stage that didn’t believe this – which was an interesting situation for me. This was a sharp contrast to so many Terminal Server, Citrix and Virtual Desktop events I attended during the last months.

I can tell you quite frankly, this bold statement made by a group of datacenter experts made me think about my own future. Will Microsoft Windows and all UNIX/Linux-based desktop operating systems disappear because they are not required anymore as a common application runtime environment? If all applications are rich web apps (AJAX), Google apps, Flash apps or Silverlight apps, there is no need for remoting conventional Windows applications.

After thinking about this issue for a couple of weeks now, I came to the conclusion that I still don’t believe in this scenario. Now you may say “Sure, he doesn’t believe it, he’s a Microsoft RDS and Citrix XenApp guy. What’d you expect?” But here’s why I’m not a believer in such a drastic move when it comes to apps:

• Microsoft conditioned users for so many years with their application interaction model; so many users will not change their behavior in such a short time. Human beings don’t change their behavior if there is not a real benefit – a rule that applies to all humans except IT geeks.
• When I look at the number of DOS and 16-bit Windows apps that are still out there since more than a decade, I just don’t believe that several 100,000 32-bit Windows apps will disappear in just 5 years.
• People want to watch TV and movies with mobile devices, which require a lot of local computing power. Why should they not use it for apps?
• There are so many cool devices with growing local CPU power and storage capacities; there must be something geared at consuming all these local resources - local apps.
• Microsoft, VMware and Citrix are investing big amounts of resources and money into remoting protocol enhancements and client hypervisor technology. These investments only provide attractive returns if conventional Windows apps survive.

The thing is, if there are local Windows apps, there’s a market for remoting such Windows apps. At this stage I wonder if Microsoft plans to combine Remote Desktop Services and their Azure platform; I mean beyond remote access to your home PC through Live Mesh. Wouldn’t it be cool if we had the opportunity to just install the Windows apps we happen to have valid licenses for in the cloud? Being able to install a hosted Microsoft Office on Azure would be a perfect completion of Microsoft Online Services including Exchange, SharePoint, Office Communicator and Live Meeting. This is what I would call “Instant Cloud” as all components are available today.

Visiting BASTA!

Last week I have been speaking at BASTA!, a major developer conference in Germany with 700 attendees and speakers. I attended several dev sessions and talked to a couple of community leaders. My own session was about optimizing code for virtual desktops.

There were some real surprises for me. First of all, the worlds of IT professionals and developers seem to reside in two different galaxies. There were sessions where the speakers made the clear statement that Win32 and .NET WinForms applications are outdated and that applications based on Windows Presentation Foundation are the new standard. When looking at my customer base, the world I live in is very different. Another speaker complained that he developed a beautiful Web-based application and his customer decided to run it through a Citrix XenApp environment and a published browser. He said that the performance was brilliant in his local development environment, but in his customer’s production environment it really sucks. Big surprise for him, but not for me. In another session Windows Azure was looked at as if it was the new standard infrastructure platform even if there is neither a final API nor an established price model, yet. It looks like these developers asume that if an app can be accessed on their laptops it is ready for large corporate environemnts.

My session was the only one during a three-day conference with up to ten parallel tracks that covered different aspects of virtualization. Some of the questions attendees asked me before and during my session almost knocked my socks off: “Is terminal services and application virtualization the same?”, “Is it true that desktop virtualization requires a remoting protocol?”, “What is a published application?”, “Can you confirm that Citrix ICA and Microsoft RDP don’t support WPF applications?” or “Why would anybody be so stupid to use a web browser in a virtual desktop instead of using the local browser?”. Don’t get me wrong, these questions came from smart people who do great jobs in their knowledge domain. There was a statement of another presenter that made me really think. He said that he tried to find about how presentation virtualization works so that he understands the impact it has on his daily work, but he was not able to find an adequate article in the Internet. It makes clear that IT pros and developers speak different languages, have different priorities, don’t share the same objectives - and don’t read or understand the same articles.

So what are the concequences? I truely believe that thought leaders in the IT pro world should educate developers about infrastructure topics and experts in Windows development should eductate IT infrastructure architects about how new applications are produced. The two groups should work more closely together as customers and users don’t care why applications do or don’t perform as expected. In most cases, users are result-oriented - and when things don’t work as expected they are disappointed of the IT guys in general. So it’s on us IT guys to adapt to this new world of user-oriented IT requirements.

Presenting at the Fall Citrix User Group Norway Event

I’m proud to announce that I’ll be presenting four sessions at the Fall Citrix User Group Norway event at the Dr. Holms Hotel in Geilo, Norway from October 7 through October 9.  There will be great speakers coming including Simon Crosby, Rich Crusco, Shawn Bass, Rick Dehlinger, Rene Vester and Alex Yushchenko.  I’m looking forward to attending and thanks to the Citrix User Group Norway for inviting me to speak there.

These are my sessions:

• How Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Change the IT Market
• How RDP/ICA Graphics and Media Remoting Really Works – Behind the Scenes (together with Shawn Bass)
• Mastering User Profiles in Terminal Server, XenApp and Virtual Desktop Environments(together with Shawn Bass)
• Windows Server 2008 (R2) RDS and Citrix XenApp Internals – System Components an Expert Should Know

ice:2009 in Lingen/Ems

Tomorrow my summer vacation is over - and the weather is still beautiful over here in Central Europe. Tomorrow afternoon, I will be heading to Lingen in the northern part of Germany. On Saturday I will be speaking at a cool community event organized by Nikki Wruck. He brings together some of Germany’s best technology experts speaking about stuff that is interesting for IT professionals and developers. My session is titled “Windows, applications and multimedia through thin wires - remoting protocols in detail”. If you want to know more, see http://www.ice-lingen.de (in German).

BriForum 2009 in Chicago

I’m back to BriForum. This year it’s in Chicago, July 21 through July 23. I will be doing four sessions.

• Day 2 – Wednesday, July 22, 2009, 2:30 pm - 3:45 pm - Behind the Scenes: Mastering User Profiles in Terminal Server and Virtual Desktop Environments, with Benny Tritsch and Shawn Bass
• Day 3 – Thursday, July 23, 2009, 8:30 am - 9:45 am - How RDP Graphics and Media Remoting Really Works, with Benny Tritsch and Shawn Bass
• Day 3 – Thursday, July 23, 2009, 1:00 pm - 2:15 pm - Tech Therapy: TS vs. VDI, with Brian Madden, Benny Tritsch, and Rick Dehlinger
• Day 3 – Thursday, July 23, 2009, 2:30 pm - 3:45 pm - Behind the Scenes - WS2008R2 Remote Desktop Services Exposed, with Benny Tritsch

If you want to check out details, go to the BriForum website.

Benny

Things I learned when traveling…

During the last couple of weeks, I’ve been traveling a lot - speaking at international conferences and meeting with customers. As always I took the opportunity to get a realistic feeling of what “the market” is up to by talking to many people. Interesting enough, it’s not necessarily the topics major vendors want us to make believe are the next big thing that many customers and community peers really care for. In a majority of cases it’s not cloud computing strategies, it’s not the introduction of iPhones for remote application access, it’s not client hypervisors, and it’s not a general VDI roll-out my customers are concentrating on these days.

Mostly it’s down-to-earth stuff they are looking at. Many of my customers started planning their Windows XP to Windows 7 migration, but want to make sure that user-specific application settings can be maintained across OS versions. They want to know how to deal with growing user data volumes without investing a fortune into new storage systems. They want to have guidelines on how to use application remoting and application isolation in their existing environments without making it the Holy Grail of their IT department or disrupting established workflows. They want to know how to virtualize their “workhorse” servers without spending too much money and wasting too many resources. They want to learn how to gradually introduce Windows Server 2008 (R2) to their existing backend infrastructures. They want to establish solid disaster recovery mechanisms with reasonable SLAs without investing into complicated and hard to manage HA platforms.

At their conferences, the big vendors such as Microsoft, VMware and Citrix tend to be talking about visions and future strategies while many customers just want solutions they can start using by tomorrow - which is definitely not too exciting from a vendor’s point of view. But many customers’ IT departments have a job to do, and that is keeping the business running in tough times. So please vendors, provide infrastructure blueprints and best practices that can be used immediately instead of evangelizing the world about what it may look like in two years. Now it’s the time to get our hands dirty and make those small steps to improve the quality of the existing IT infrastructures instead of promoting the upcoming big bangs, which probably will never happen.

Citrix Synergy

I just came back home from Citrix Synergy in Las Vegas - for details about the conference check out http://www.citrixsynergy.com/. I attended several sessions there inlcuding the keynotes, spoke to interesting people and had some conversations with vendors. In summary I was able to identify the following Synergy highlights:

• Introduction of a Citrix cloud strategy in combination with Amazon EC2
• XenClient, the upcoming free client hypervisor (aka project “Independence”)
• Receiver for iPhone
• Dazzle, a free tool for application self-assignment
• Virtual NetScaler appliance
• HDX multimedia acceleration

Even though these are great topics, they are either very visionary or around free tools. I was asking myself what messages partners or customers would take away from this event, in terms of what they should be doing during the next six to twelve months - and I must admit that I didn’t get a real answer to this question. In particular, I had the feeling that XenApp as the commercially most relevant product did not get the attention it deserved. In other words, Citrix missed to show real advances regarding XenApp manageability and present sessions about user profile management.

It looks like Citrix descided to use Synergy to primarily talk about the future and leave today’s business to their partners…

Windows Server 2008 R2 RC

These days, everybody is talking about the release candidate of Windows 7, available for download for TechNet and MSDN subscribers. However, when I downloaded the Windows 7 RC last Friday, I figured that the release candidate of Windows Server 2008 R2 is also available. Looks like Microsoft really wants to release both server and workstation editions of their upcoming Windows OS simultaneously.

Login Consultants Roadshow

I’m on the road again! For the next two weeks I will be speaking at the Login Consultants Roadshow in Germany. If you want to join me, here are all dates and locations:

• Munich 21.04.09, Sheraton München Westpark Hotel
• Stuttgart 22.04.09, Pullman Stuttgart Fontana
• Frankfurt 23.04.09, Mercure Hotel & Residenz Frankfurt Messe
• Neuss 27.04.09, Hotel Novotel Düsseldorf Neuss Am Rosengarten
• Hannover 28.04.09, Parkhotel Kronsberg

I will be speaking about cloud computing and I will be commenting gossips about Microsoft and Citrix that I found in the Internet.

Other sessions will cover the following topics:

• VDI versus Terminal Services - or back to fat clients?
• Project Virtual Reality Check - benchmarking results
• A Login Consultants’ reference customer report
• Quest vWorkspace, the broker you can trust

Microsoft MVP Award

It’s my pleasure to announce that Microsoft informed me yesterday that they re-elected me into the MVP program for another year. I’m a Terminal Server MVP since 2004 and I really appreciate the relationship I was able to build up to the TS product team in Redmond through the MVP program. So this is great news for me that I can stay on the progam.

For those of you who don’t know what the MVP status means, here’s the description provided by Microsoft:

Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) are exceptional technical community leaders from around the world who are awarded for voluntarily sharing their high quality, real world expertise in offline and online technical communities. Microsoft MVPs are a highly select group of experts that represents the technical community’s best and brightest, and they share a deep commitment to community and a willingness to help others.

If you want to check out my MVP profile, see https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/Tritsch