The online survey indicated some apparent limitations in Canadian companies’ mobility strategies, such as not seeing mobility and remote working as the same thing. Citrix Canada chief Michael Murphy is, however, rather more positive about where Canadian companies are here, and where they are going.
The two companies have been long-time partners around VDI, but this extension of their relationship makes a very low cost hyper-converged offering, which combines Atlantis’ hyper-converged infrastructure with the full Xen stack, available to any certified Citrix partner.
Nutanix’s president acknowledged that the industry’s previous announced attempts at a low-cost VDI solution have been basically junk, which have left customers suspicious of such claims. Nutanix InstantON VDI for Citrix, on the other hand, is an enterprise-capable turnkey solution, which really will come in in the $500 price range, including the endpoint.
Nutanix sees its native file serving solution on the Nutanix Distributed File Storage Fabric as opening up a large new market for it displacing NAS servers, and bringing disruption to a NAS market they say has been ready for it for a while.
The new VMware Workspace ONE suite, and enhanced VMware Horizon VDI and Horizon Air solutions and VMware vRealize Suite 7 cloud management suite offer channel partners enhanced opportunities and the ability to gain deeper relationships with customers.
An appliance originally designed to bring Citrix into the low end of the market has had its scalability increased more than tenfold, now supporting up to 5000 users. Dell also announced its new ThinOS software, which now supports Skype for Business, and is backwards compatible into the existing install base.
The Wyse products have had their own specific support packages since they were acquired by Dell, but the increasing visibility of the Dell ProSupport brand, and the availability of some new services not previously available to Dell Wyse has led to the change.
Citrix certifies the complete Nutanix Acropolis solution as Citrix Ready, in what they intimate is only an opening round in future joint technical advances.
The virtualized performance management solutions startup has made unsuccessful channel initiatives before, but now armed with personnel and resources to execute, they are looking to enlist Citrix and VMware partners with professional services practices – and for the first time, MSPs.
Stratoscale emerged from stealth late last year with some powerful vendor investors, a unique hyperconverged value proposition and a 100 per cent channel strategy. The plan is for the product to be available this summer.
At Citrix Synergy, Dell also announced new versions of two related software solutions, Dell Wyse Device Manager 5.5 and Foglight for Virtualization 8.2.
SkyBridge adapts Panzura’s technology which enables cross-site collaboration between controllers in the cloud, to make cloud VDI much more effective.
Digital disruption is intensifying IT democratization, and Dell is responding with a datacentre strategy which some competitors likely consider heresy, but which Dell believes is the wave of the future.
