Isn’t the Microsoft-Citrix alliance as perfect as marketing pictures it?
|
|
|
|
No matter how hard Microsoft and Citrix try to convince customers.
The whole idea that the two companies can recreate the Terminal Services-MetaFrame synergy on server virtualization doesn’t sound good. And it doesn’t sound good for a simple reason: in the first case, MetaFrame (or Presentation Server or XenApp) is a sophisticated add-on that enriches Terminal Services but can’t exist without it; in the second case, Microsoft and Citrix have completely overlapping virtualization platform which can fully replace each other.
The two companies may be totally aligned in terms of marketing effort to jointly attack the VMware leadership, but what happens when the Microsoft and Citrix sales guys actually visit the customers?
Aren’t they obliged to compete for the same account? If not, how exactly they suggest to the customer to choose between Hyper-V plus System Center versus XenServer plus Essentials? And even if there’s no friction there, which hypervisor do they recommend between Hyper-V and XenServer when the customer wants a XenDesktop-powered VDI environment?
The Microsoft and Citrix official position is that they don’t care which hypervisor is chosen, but virtualization is still pretty new for many. When the customer looks for guidance, how they will proceed?
Finally, somebody reports about this untold conflict:
…One instance where I was involved was where Microsoft actually brought Citrix into a pre-sales meeting. The discussions were going well and the talk was about Hyper-V, among other things, being deployed in this customer. Without any indication of what was coming, the Citrix Field Sales team proceeded to stand and step all over Microsoft and start talking about XenServer and why this needed to be the hypervisor of choice in this customer’s environment. Needless to say, the customer was confused and looked like a “deer in the headlights”. The discussion went downhill fast and the meeting ended with the customer frustrated, confused, and wondering why Microsoft and Citrix weren’t getting along as was always talked about and that the message was so confusing. So what happened? The customer went with VMware and has since moved deeper into that technology…
Of course this is just an opinion, even if it comes from a well-known, respected and knowledgeable expert in the virtualization community.
As usual, virtualization.info welcomes other, different opinions. And if they come from the field level it’s much better.
virtualization.info Newest articles
December 20th, 2011
Oracle has released version 4.1.8 of its virtualization platform VM VirtualBox. This version which can be considered a maintenance release can be installed on top of any VM VirtualBox 4.1.x…
December 20th, 2011
VKernel, recently acquired by Quest Software has released version 4.5. of its vOperations Suite (vOps). vOperations is a suite of products providing Performance Analysis, Capacity Management, Resource Optimization, Reporting and…
December 7th, 2011
Teradici is the developer of the PC-over-IP (PCoIP) remote desktop protocol, which is leveraged in software (by VMware view) and provided with Teradici hardware solutions which are OEM’ed by several…
December 7th, 2011
Citrix has released a whitepaper titled:"Windows 2008 R2 Optimization Guide For Desktop Virtualization with XenApp 6 / 6.5", the paper which contains 23 pages outlines optimization for XenApp 6 and…
December 6th, 2011
In November Microsoft released a public beta of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) version 6.5. Today Microsoft announced its release, which is the follow-up of version 6.0 which…
December 6th, 2011
Open source vendor Red Hat has released version 6.2 of its Linux distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This version is the follow-up of version 6.1 which was released in May…
December 6th, 2011
Microsoft has released version 3.2 of the Linux Integration Services for its hypervisor Hyper-V. This version is the follow-up of version 3.1 which was released in July this year.
The…
November 29th, 2011
Since its first official release beginning 2009, the Virtual Session Indexer(VSI) has gained popularity as an independent benchmarking tool. One of the projects using the VSI tool is Project Virtual…
November 21st, 2011
VMware has released version 4.1 of its desktop virtualization platform for Apple Mac: Fusion. This release is considered an minor upgrade for version 4.0 which was released in September this…
November 21st, 2011
In September VMware released a new major version of its virtualization platform Workstation 8.0 and in October it released Player 4.0. Now VMware released an update for its virtualization platform…
November 17th, 2011
VMware has released version 4.7 of of its application virtualization solution ThinApp. This version includes the ability to use ThinApp packages in combination with its Software as a Service (SaaS)…
November 17th, 2011
VKernel, provider of performance and capacity management products, has announced its acquisition by Quest Software. VKernel will operate as a independent subsidiary of Quest.
VKernel entered the virtualization market in…
November 16th, 2011
Lanamark has released a new version of its Capacity Planning platform Suite, this version is the follow up of version 2010 which was released in March last year.
Suite 2012…
November 15th, 2011
In November last year, started releasing Solaris 11 Express, the development version eventually leading to the release of Oracle Solaris 11 which was released last week. Solaris is one of…
Copyright © 2003-2012 virtualization.info. All rights reserved.
virtualization.info | cloudcomputing.info | virtualization.tv | Virtualization Congress