Brian Madden's June speaking schedule: Sweden, Chicago, London, The Netherlands, and Belgium

May and June are prime conference and seminar months. I'll be speaking at the following events in June:

Posted by Brian Madden on May 30, 2008 -

Citrix's ICA problem, while not as bad as VMware's RDP problem, is still a problem for widespread VDI adoption

The fact that today's remoting protocols have some limitations seems lost on VMware and Citrix--at least in their marketing messaging. For example, the only "real limitations" of XenDesktop that Citrix's Sumit Dhawan mentions are "offline access requirements or advanced peripheral support." In last week's letter to partners, VMware's Jeff Jennings wrote that "One of the main value propositions of a virtual desktop is that all your applications work in a VDI environment." Neither vendor mentions the real inconvenient truth—that neither ICA nor RDP can remote all applications.

Posted by Brian Madden on May 29, 2008 -

Today is my five-year blogging anniversary

On May 28, 2003, I posted my first blog entry on BrianMadden.com. You can still read it today, with DocID #1 - "Tarantella buys New Moon." So what made me decide to blog? Like most things in life, the path was not direct.

Posted by Brian Madden on May 28, 2008 -

The complete text of VMware's letter to partners positioning VDI on the day Citrix released XenDesktop 2.0

The day that Citrix released XenDesktop 2.0, VMware sent the following email to their partners:

Posted by Brian Madden on May 27, 2008 -

Citrix XenDesktop + XenApp bundling: Bye-bye application tax. Hello offline tax.

A few weeks ago, I wrote that Citrix pricing was out-of-whack because Citrix XenApp was $350-$600 per CCU, while Citrix XenDesktop was $75-$275 per CCU. I called this an "application tax" because publishing a single application cost much more than publishing a full desktop (since the single app required the expensive XenApp while publishing the desktop required the less expense XenDesktop). At their Synergy conference last week, Citrix officially released XenDesktop, and in doing so they announced some surprise bundling and pricing.

Posted by Brian Madden on May 27, 2008 -

Shawn Bass is my hero

One of the new features at Citrix's Synergy conference this year is something called Geek Speak Live. This is basically a chance for members of the community to get up on stage and spend 20 minutes talking about whatever they want. Last night Shawn Bass talked about VDI. Today, everyone (I mean EVERYONE) is buzzing about Shawn's talk.

Posted by Brian Madden on May 22, 2008 -

Citrix XenApp 5.0 seems to be delayed several months. Is this the result of a "refocused Citrix"?

Citrix has announced many things here at Synergy, but one thing that's missing is an announcement of the release of the "Delaware" version of Presentation Server, which Citrix will sell as "Citrix XenApp 5.0." The current Presentation Server 4.5 product does NOT work on Windows Server 2008, so if you want to use Citrix + Server 2008, you need XenApp 5.

Posted by Brian Madden on May 21, 2008 -

Major news items from Citrix Synergy

Citrix Synergy is going on now in Houston. We're barely two hours into the conference, and there have already been some major news items. I can't possibly do justice to write about each of these things today, so I'm going to use this article to aggregate and provide quick overviews of all these stories, and then I'll go in-depth into each of them more over the next few days or so.

Posted by Brian Madden on May 20, 2008 -

Ugh! I guess I need to start calling it "XenApp" now too.

Most readers know that I love the name XenApp as the new name for Presentation Server. The only thing that I didn't like was the fact that Citrix is now referring to Presentation Server 4.5 as "XenApp" instead of simply using the term XenApp for the new versions of the product moving forward. So even though I didn't agree with the way Citrix uses the term XenApp, I have to admit: It's everywhere! And it's getting really hard for me to keep using the term "Presentation Server."

Posted by Brian Madden on May 20, 2008 -

Would Intel buying VMware force Citrix and AMD to merge?

On Friday, Alessandro blogged about a rumor that EMC might sell VMware to Intel. If that were to happen, how would Microsoft and Citrix (VMware's chief competitors) respond? And how would AMD (Intel's chief competitor) respond? Could this lead to a marriage/merger/alliance between Microsoft/Citrix and AMD?

Posted by Brian Madden on May 19, 2008 -