subject: Interop Keynote: Mark Templeton, Citrix [print this page] Interop NY 2009 kicked off this morning with General Manager, Lenny Heymann's optimistic and future-looking remarks for the gratifyingly large crowd. No doubt 2009 has been a challenge for all businesses. Over the past year, we've seen companies go under, a new acquisition frenzy only partially being driven by "bargain hunting" and an overall mindset of cost-cutting and super cost-consciousness even in the "buffered" government IT space.
Last year this time, we saw entire IT departments being let go at major financial institutions. One year later, Lenny can see the light on the horizon, signs of recovery and praised IT for its role in helping to economy move forward.
From virtualization to cloud computing - far from being a "dark" time for IT, the opportunities and outlook are very rosy. The possibilities for true transformative change has never been greater and as shown in Interop surveys, Lenny sees IT embracing and being a driver for this change.
(To see the keynotes and sessions live or on-demand, check out the Interop TV site)
So first up on the Keynote stage was Mark Templeton, President & CEO of Citrix Systems. His presentation: Transformation in Enterprise IT. Mark sees the IT challenges we face now as the biggest and toughest but also providing the most opportunity ever, especially as changes can drive agility and velocity of the businesss.
First, he took us back to the Mainframe era (1960's - 1980's). We bought everything from vendors like IBM, NCR, Honeywell, etc. This worked great for IBM but not the rest of the bunch. Then came the transformation around Personal Computing.
With the Personal Computing shift came the Distributed Computing Era for Enterprise IT (1990's - 2002). Industry re-orged itself along stacks (or silos as we tend to describe it), e.g., server os bs server hardware vs storage, etc.
And now along comes the transformation around virtualization to trigger the new era for Enterprise IT: On-Demand Services Era (2002-present) - focused on service delivery, cloud, web 2.0, SaaS. First time the computing era is not a "technical" label but business process around delivery. Holy Grail: deliver IT as an on-demand service. Great idea but really hard. IT's mindset is not as a service provider now (but as we've always talked about, they need to get there).
In the Distributed Computing era, here's what happened: client + management + security + network + server. Bolted together and optimized (sometimes together) but no matter how much you optimize this, the original false set of assumptions creates complexity of enormous scale.
In order to simplify a system that is complex - either make each part more efficient or eliminate parts. Less is both more and simpler and will get you to the agility that you need. Consumerization will force more IT change over the next 10 years than any other trend.
Around 2002, consumer IT (online) got better and better every day, surpassing enterprise IT rate of improvement (and the product plug - Citrix customers taking IT into their own hands)
Citrix's #1 in SaaS: GoToMeeting, GoToAssist, etc...
Echo Generation or the Millenials- this generation is driving a huge amoun of change around consumerization. This will create a struggle over control between IT and users (how, where and what). Mark shared this quote from Abraham Lincoln: if I had 8 hours to cut down a tree, I would spend the first 7 hours sharpening my axe.
So what's the real problem? Spend the time thinking about this, defining it and then executing on solution. (kind of a tangent in this presentation but thought I'd include it because I like the quote so much). GOAL: users get IT services that as easily as turning on the TV. Based on self-service along the lines of an ATM. So enterprise IT "advertises" what they have available and users "subscribe" to the services as needed. (Cool Advertiser/Subscriber model. Have to say as much as IT complains about marketing, I cannot imagine they'll love having to "advertise" Perhaps there's another term that would make them like it better.)
The Agenda for Transforming IT today:
1) Device & network independence
2) Any-to-any, secure when needed (web model of when security kicks in)
3) Self-service user experiences
4) Elastic service capacity (cloud model)
5) Consumption-based costs
And finally in what was not so bad of a segue, Citrix's announcement today: Around NetScaler - a new "Pay-as-you-Grow" model. Buy an appliance like the NetScaler MPX 9700, 3Gbps. Then with a license key, easily grow to 5Gbps, then 8 Gbps as needed.
Virtualized version of this for the lower end - free 1Mbps VPX Express, and then license key to upgrade to 10mbps, 200 mbps, and 1Gbps. Virtualization breaks the hard coding between the distributed computing stacks that hinder agility.
Transformation of:
1) Work - not a place, something you do anywhere
2) Desktop - not a device, becomes a service
3) Data Center - not a collection of infrastructure in a building, but going forward a "delivery center" with resources in and out of the physical data center (Precisely - this is a core of our forward-looking product strategy and one reason EM7 G3 won Best of Interop this year for Network Management)
In the end, all this transformation will of course slash business & computing costs but more than that, put the fun and impact back into IT. (A worthwhile goal)
