John Katsaros

The Fourth Cloud

Mark Templeton's keynote at Synergy, the annual Citrix users' conference is usually pretty interesting and this year was no exception. Templeton introduced the "Fourth Cloud" — the Personal Cloud — to what has largely been a three cloud world (Public, Private and Hybrid). The Fourth Cloud is an important concept because it defines the place where corporate IT meets the workforce. If IT gets this right, they'll be able to minimize the footprint of what IT has to own and what applications IT has to manage. Templeton's point is that it is in IT's best interests to make this happen since they'll ultimately benefit. He pointed out three essential ingredients for the personal cloud — 1) Context Switching — any to any connectivity, secure where necessary; 2) Self Service (including an apps store and of course things like Google Apps); and 3) Identity and preferences — managing the convergence of personal and work use. Citrix's view of the personal cloud is that it has: A front door that orchestrates delivery, Follow Me apps and data, Authentication /Security (Single Sign On, password management...), Cloud Connectors (for both business cloud and social cloud interactions) and Management (activity, Access Control, SLAs...). The Personal Cloud is a great idea — rentable applications, disposable devices, automatic synchronization, self service, and bridging into consumer apps — offloading from IT functionality and cost that is better acquired as consumer products. At previous Synergy keynotes, Templeton shined a light on the concept of BYOPC (Bring Your Own PC) which eventually has become a familiar phrase. The idea of a Personal Cloud (and IT's relationship to it) fits in nicely and takes BYOPC to the next level.

If you have to train someone to use it, don't build it

We probably need to create a category of "Templeton-isums" to keep a list of some of Citrix's Mark Templeton's sayings. What Yogi Berra's Yogi-isums ("Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded") were to baseball Templeton-isums are to IT. The latest that came from his Synergy 11 keynote were "don't fight it, feature it" referring to IT's reluctance to unleash iPhones and iPads onto the corporate network. And "Never do an IT project that requires training" — great advice. Over the last few years while you think we've made progress the truth is that the Internet has turned us into telephone operators, travel agents, bank tellers etc. There's no way that you can train all the users to know how to use these apps — they have to be well designed. It's the simplicity of these "isums" makes them memorable.

Citrix Synergy 2010

The Citrix customer conference was local (for us) this year. The meeting has bounced back nicely from the receded form in the recession and had sold out. Citrix meetings are always fun to attend: the user group has an enthusiasm and loyalty I've only seen before at things like the Apple developer conference (where the Cool Aid flows like wine). And we know the management team reasonably well and are always impressed by their collective cheerful hard-driving spirit. 2 1/2 years ago Citrix, when it acquired Xen, made a huge ($500M) bet on virtualization of various forms as a way of breaking out of (and defending) their core application delivery business. They've had plans to more thoroughly integrate all the pieces and now this all seems to be coming to pass. In the past, Mark Templeton's keynotes were best understood by the Presentation Server faithful, but that wasn't the case this year at all. Mark's opening keynote (replete with demos) paints Citrix' vision very clearly — how we get to our stuff from anywhere and any device, in an ever more wireless and mobile world. It takes a lot of technology and careful engineering (and re-engineering) to make it all happen but in the end the vision is simple and quite compelling. Watching Mark's keynote on Web replay is highly recommended.