Less than 10 months ago, Citrix released its own data center orchestration framework: Workflow Studio.
The future of virtualization (and cloud computing) depends on automation, so products like this are very welcome here at virtualization.info.
Unfortunately, for many customers, it’s not easy to recognize their value at today.
A company has to reach a critical mass of virtual machines before it can finally see the benefits of automating a large part of their lifecycle.
At the same time orchestration is often associated with scripting, which sounds like a complex procedure that only the most technical members of the staff can own, and that can be used only in very circumstantiated scenarios.
Orchestration is much beyond scripting but virtualization vendors in general are not doing a great job in clarifying so, and so it’s still really hard to get the real potential of the technology.
Citrix, like VMware or Novell with their products, didn’t push much its Workflow Studio so far.
Even for the launch of Workflow Studio 2.0 the company isn’t really spending much effort to say what’s new:
- Native XenApp activity libraries (and many other additional activities)
- Remote runtimes
- Simplified management interface
- Enhanced security features
- Simplified installation and configuration
- Improved SDK
- Simplified workflow Designer
- Globalization support
What the above means? Let’s put aside the last six items. Are the first two anything that a non-scripting guy could understand?
Unless the vendors will start to reconsider the way they communicate the value and capabilities of their orchestration frameworks it’s very unlikely that a significant number of customers will get interested.