A View From the Stage at Citrix Summit - VDI Intelligence, Anyplace, Anytime

In our personal and business lives, we all strive to improve productivity and efficiency. And, a fundamental cause of inefficiency is having to do things with a dependency on a specific location or time. For example, when I was a young boy needing to research some topic, I’d have my mom drive me to the library – a specific location, and when it was open – a specific time of day. One generation later, when my son researches the same topic, he can anytime, anywhere (there’s connectivity) access the Wikipedia or Google search.

Consider verbal communication, where the first telephones annihilated the location dependency for real time talk, and voicemail reduced the time dependency for message passing, thus increasing its efficiency. And for many banking tasks, the 24 hour ATM broke the bond of time. As the internet matured, it further increased productivity by reducing place and time dependencies. Now, impute this notion of location and time independence on accessing our apps, data, and workspaces. That’s what Citrix, coupled with HPE’s converged VDI infrastructure solutions, do for us – enabling this remote and anytime access, greatly enhancing both personal and professional efficiency.

Today we’re kicking it up a notch. At the 2017 Citrix Summit partner conference in Anaheim, we’ll debut the industry’s first rugged Citrix workspace appliance expressly designed for today’s Intelligent Edge. Offices, branches, and remote locations comprise the intelligent edge, and it’s where many mid-market employees develop and scale apps to better serve their customers. We aptly call this, the Intelligent Edge Workspace Appliance. It’s built on the hardware infrastructure of HPE’s Edgeline Converged Edge Systems <https://www.hpe.com/us/en/product-catalog/servers/edgeline-systems.html>. These Edgeline Systems are the proven converged infrastructure we provide for intelligent edge and IoT applications. And now we’re extending our ecosystem partnerships to deliver a seamless appliance, by blending the Edgeline EL4000 with Atlantis Computing’s USX virtual workspace infrastructure, and the Citrix Cloud Virtual Apps and Desktop with Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop/XenServer. Citrix cloud connected management and access is built in, Atlantis management is built in, simple and easy.

This three piece suit is a potent combination, as it breaks location dependencies on where enterprise class IT can be placed. This is because the Edgeline EL4000 system is a rugged and compact converged infrastructure, integrating enterprise class compute, storage, and management. It’s also temperature, shock, and vibration hardened. This makes it suitable for outside the traditional data center – but it’s the same familiar VDI software, compute, and storage management as inside the data center. This results in simple, fast, and secure deployment of VDI at many types of locations, reducing integration risk and deployment time to mere hours.

The Intelligent Edge Workspace Appliance addresses the challenges of IT staff at mid-market businesses and offices, who must provide enterprise-class VDI user experiences but with significantly less budget and resources. As a first mover, we fashioned this solution within the new Citrix-Ready HCI Workspace Appliance Program, which Citrix announced today. I’m happy to be a part of advancing HPE’s expertise in convergence, VDI, and partner ecosystems with Citrix and Atlantis --- all on behalf of our customers’ success.

Like I say, “A good company follows the trends, but a great company sets the trends”. And we’re setting trends with VDI in the Intelligent Edge by driving new levels of convergence and location independence. Stay tuned for more on this, and other intriguing first mover initiatives. I also invite you to follow me on Twitter @TomBradicichPhD.