At Citrix Synergy this year, Citrix announced what is called the Citrix Workspace Services (CWS), which is a hosted service that can be used for the creation, management and orchestration and monitoring of the end users mobile workspaces which encompasses not just their Desktops (XenDesktop), but also their apps (XenApp) and data (Sharefile). CWS can also…
Desktop as a Service (DaaS) – Is it the Silver Bullet we’ve been waiting for?
With Amazon’s recent announcement of Workspaces offering and VMware’s Horizon DaaS offering, customers have started to inquire about to relevance and reality of such a solution.  As a Sales Engineer, I address these questions from customers on a daily basis. While I believe DaaS is here to stay and might be a perfect fit for some…
My Rebuttal to the latest VMware FUD: Citrix XenDesktop is for “Purely Virtual” use case
I recently got hold of a sales campaign email from VMware which focused around “taking out” existing XenApp customers by upselling them the VMware Horizon suite. The objective was to prevent customers from upgrading to XenDesktop. While I am all for competing with VMware and having a healthy debate on our competing strategies when it…
Synergy Recap Part 2 – XenMobile Announcements
Continuing on the topic on Synergy, changes to the XenMobile product suite was the other big announcement.. Lets take a step back.. Up until the beginning of this 2013, Citrix’s approach to mobililty was Mobile Application Management through their CloudGateway product. The strategy was that enterprises would have the ability to deliver SaaS, Web, Windows…
Synergy 2013 Recap: Part 1- XenDesktop 7
I was fortunate enough to attend Citrix Synergy this year at Anaheim, CA. The event was great as always with around 6500 attendees, 125+ unique sessions, the ever popular Geek Speak Live and Maroon5 who brought the house down. For me though, the highlight was MarkT’s keynote and Brad Peterson’s demos. Noone can tell a…
My response to Vmware’s post – “Enhancing a Citrix XenApp implementation with VMware View and Thinapp”
Vmware published an article  a couple of days back on how they believe Thinapp and VMware View enhances Xenapp. My personal belief, on the contrary is that XenApp ELIMINATES the need for View and Thinapp in a lot of  use cases. In many scenarios, customers want “VDI” without really understanding whether it is the right fit…
Exchange 2010 – TLS negotiation on Send Connectors
Over the past month of so, I’ve been troubleshooting an issue that I felt I should blog about. What we would notice was that when Exchange receives emails with attachments, it took an awfully long time to forward the email to the smart host. An email with a 1Mb attachment would typically take between 10-15 minutes to…
The iPad – Views from a geek who sold his arm to Microsoft and his leg to Apple
As most other geeks out there, I was eagerly awaiting Steve Job’s announcement yesterday about the iPad. My buddy Adam and I were “Working” and following the live blog feed on engadget. As a person who started off his career being a Microsoft cool aid drinker, but then converted to a Mac user, I feel…