Brian Madden interview of Brian Nason and Sumit Dhawan about Trinity
Brian Madden was on an interviewing roll when he came to Citrix headquarters late last year. I’ve already covered two of these interviews in previous blogs (Mark Templeton and Brad Pedersen) and now it’s time to cover the interview with Brian Nason and Sumit Dhawan.
The personal value of this is that I work on PortICA which is an important component of the Citrix Desktop Server strategy. Our team has already invested about a year and a half working on PortICA and things are looking good. Please understand that I can’t get too detailed about what is currently going on based on the typical worries of keeping things confidential.
Sometimes when you work on projects it is easy to lose touch with the bigger picture of what is going on. That’s why it’s good to hear the story from those that are directly influencing how things are going to turn out in the long run. Both Sumit and Brian are very knowledgeable about Citrix’s future offering in the desktop space. These interviews with Brian Madden are really good for both Citrix and its customers and channel partners. The message comes through that Citrix is listening to customer and channel feedback and is planning on a future that would not have been possible if it continued to be isolated from decent involvement.
Even though this interview was performed in late December of last year, it is largely matching with what the current statements are. The most obvious difference is that Trinity is now publicly called Citrix Desktop Server.
Internally and externally there has been quite a buzz around this new field for Citrix. It is becoming clear that the desktop market is largely untapped by Citrix and that Citrix can add much value based on its experience with delivering applications from a server-based environment. The essential shift here is that PortICA makes it possible to support distributing Windows applications from workstation class machines (real and virtual). Also of note is that PortICA, which is part of CDS (Citrix Desktop Server), has split out work that would normally reside on CPS (Citrix Presentation Server). Like Brian and Sumit talk about in the interview, IMA does not reside on the PortICA workstation. The configuration and support has been greatly simplified for the machine that does the work of running applications. The concept is that the management pieces have been split to another machine so that the PortICA machine can focus on doing what it does best. It also makes it possible to apply the PortICA model to other problems and create other solutions. The management machine (which internally has been called the controller) can manage a great number of workstations based on the idea of splitting the work. Potentially it also allows for greater scalability with a CDS deployment.
It is fairly safe to say these kind of things at this point but I’m still sensitive to confessing things that are considered confidential for the sake of the project and the company.
The overall intent is to give you data you won’t hear anywhere else and still remain within the boundaries of what the company does not want to be public knowledge. It’s silly that I’m even focusing on this but I wanted to let you know that I’m trying to say as much as I can to help create a better understanding of PortICA and CDS in the field.
With that, I hope you have some time to listen to the interview over at the Brian Madden site based on the links at the top of this post. It’s about 40 minutes long and does a fairly good job of explaining why Citrix thinks it is important and why customers have been asking for Citrix to pursue it.
Thanks!
Live near Brisbane, Australia. Software developer currently focused on iOS and Android. Avid Google Local Guide
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