Let me ask this question: "How much of an understanding do you and your management have on how your company makes money thereby having a staff that knows where the money comes from and where it goes?"...

I start every initial meeting out with a statement around change. I pretty much tell everyone that with almost perfect certainty that over the next decade their company will be challenged to change in a way that they may never have thought of and for which there is no precedent. Which begs these questions; “how quickly can your company identify and respond to change? If you do identify it, can you leverage it to your advantage?”...

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

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....

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....

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

My very good friend Matt Lesak over at Citrix has made his personal notes available to everyone. I want to give a big round of thanks to Matt for sharing his experiences with this technology. Thanks Matt. ...

There have been numerous stories bouncing around in the last couple of days concerning pricing of virtualization products along with technological differentiation discussions; who has what? Who is doing what? etc with regards to both Citrix and VMware among others. I’m sure that you all will agree with me that this industry if full of competitors, each one out there working to beat their respective competition. We hear every day about how VMware says this isn’t true about XenDesktop/XenServer and Citrix saying that they can do this and they can do that vs. VMware/VDI, etc....

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.

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Patrick Rouse created a great VDI Connection broker comparison. Patrick works for Quest/Provision Networks, but he serious investigated the VMware VDM and Citrix XenDesktop solution. I know that some people reviewed this matrix just to be sure that this document is as accurate as possible. This connection broker comparison matrix compares Citrix XenDesktop, VMware Virtual Desktop Manager and Provision Networks Virtual Access Suite. It's a nice starting point in investigating which connection broker fits your needs. BTW: What are you connection broker needs?! ...