Citrix slated to axe its Technology Professional program Citrix is winding up its Citrix Technology Professional (CTP) program, a move described as "a short-sighted decision that reflects a lack of vision for the future." It has been a weekend of long knives for Citrix fanatics as the company told members of the Citrix Technology Professional (CTP) program that the initiative was to …
As I opined recently when Broadcom announced the same tactic with VMWare, do these companies who drop all-but-their-largest customers not consider the ramifications vis-à-vis the power dynamic?
If you have thousands of customers, you can antagonize one or even several of them and it’s NBD. But if you’re reliant on a handful of whales, and you do something that one of them doesn’t like - you EOL the product they’re using, say, or push them into a new subscription contract - they have much more leverage, and the potential to make a big dent in your revenue numbers.
Until morality improves.
Essentially, the community was told that their free contributions amounted to less than nothing and their expertise is at the mercy of their corporate benevolent dictators.
CTA and CTP should get scooped up by XCP-ng and the opensource teams that have parallel products to Citrix.
...I've mentioned before that I spent a significant chunk of my career working with Citrix products. I'd go so far as to say that at one point, I probably knew more than anyone outside of the developers (and even them, for some of the earlier iterations of what would become nFuse Enterprise, having worked with the creator of nFuse to build it).
I was CCEA number 54, (or so I was told) back in the day. You got access to a CCEA-only website. One whose entire content was simply a list of the exams you needed to pass to become a CCEA...erm... yeah.
Over the years, I contributed heavily on forums, support sites etc but got nothing back for my efforts. Not even vague recognition.
But I haven't touched it in years, now. My last big project on it was 2018 and even before that, it was a few years between them. The writing has simply been on the wall for a company who sold the ability to connect to on-premise applications over slow connectivity such as dialup.
Now you have most apps as web-apps, and/or fast connectivity into them, the whole reason to have it has slowly disintegrated. There are still a few shining lights (or were when I last worked with it) such as the NetScalers, but again...super expensive by comparison.
Why anyone these days would pay to have expensive Citrix licenses on top of expensive RDS CALS is beyond me when the latter can do 90% of the former.
VDI has never taken off to the extent the likes of Citrix hoped it would - again, it's all the complexity of thin client environment with all the complexity of a fat client OS, that requires a highly perfomant back-end, to give you what? A tiny selection of valid use cases.
They've been circling the drain for years now. All this is doing is shoving a hot poker up the arses of people who've helped to get them where they were (I won't say are, because they've fucked it up themselves) who will now move onto other things and let the death spiral accelerate.
It's a shame but it has an air of inevitability that I've called out more than once.
"You got access to a CCEA-only website"
That's why vendor specific certifications are fucking crap...why keep useful hidden behind an exam result? I know in this instance, there wasn't anything useful...but for VMWare when I first certified, I can't remember which cert it was now, it was so long ago...I got their top tier cert and it gave me access to licenses and resources and all sorts of stuff that wasn't available for lesser certified folks...but the irony is I didn't need any of it after I'd passed...I already had everything...if anything, the stuff would have been more useful before I reached that tier and would have made the climb up a lot easier.
It's like climbing up a mountain, starving, with another person...and the entire time that person doesn't offer you anything until you reach the summit after a shit load of struggle when they could have offered you a snack or something at any point on the way up to make it less of a struggle.
Microsoft Technet subscriptions were a similar story...yes they were useful, but you had to pay a fortune and spend ages getting the right certs to allow you to subscribe (and fucking pay) for the good subscription with the updates, product previews etc etc...what a stack of wank.
"Over the years, I contributed heavily on forums, support sites etc but got nothing back for my efforts. Not even vague recognition."
You never will on a vendor specific forum run by the vendor, I'm in the same boat...I've contributed to loads and loads of forums, chat groups and various other mediums of sharing tech assistance over the years...in the places that aren't vendor specific, you get a good crowd who are grateful for your sharing and who contribute back...but on vendor forums, no chance...the non-vendor specific places tend to get shut down from time to time when things are posted that a vendor might not like...I've seen that happen countless times...I can even remember the first time that happened. There was an RM Machines specific site (which had an offshoot message board somewhere that I can't recall) called "Crash Dummies"...it was mostly centred around systems administration of the RM based work stuff you found in schools and colleges etc...as well as security related stuff (which is where the rub was)...great place to learn stuff, I was still in college and mostly interested in the *cough* hacking *cough* stuff...but I got a lot out of it and it was probably a contributor to me actually joining the industry. If I could buy those guys a beer now, I would.
I had all the manuals that I had...borrowed...from the sysadmin office at my college and read them cover to cover...but I wanted more...so I found that little site and it's loosely affiliated message board and I learned a heck of a lot about network security...certainly enough for my college sysadmin to slam a door and shout at me while calling me every name under the sun...fun fact, it was the first time someone had called me a "fucking c*nt" in a serious tone...a Scottish tone.
Short sighted? Who cares about vendor certs anymore?
They haven't been worth anything for decades now. Not once in 20+ years has a vendor cert ever had any meaningful positive impact on my career, earnings or ability. If anything, they pigeonhole you and limit your career..."oh you're the Microsoft / Cisco / Citrix / VMWare / Apple guy".
Vendor neutral certs on the other hand, massive impact..."Oh you're the cybersecurity / architecture / network / server guy".
I have certs up the wazoo at this point, countless Microsoft, VMWare, Apple, Dell, Cisco, this phone system, that network kit manufacturer, the other software package etc etc...all a massive waste of time and I only have them because either I got them cheap as beta exams or a customer demanded it with no kind of compensation for the effort other than "we won't fire you".
If you were to total up the cost of all the certs over my career so far, it'd have made quite a radical difference to my pension...vendor certs are theft.
I think Citrix has made a solid move here that shows they understand something...get rid of the faff and bullshit.
It isn't a certification in the same way as if you passed an exam - it's a recognition of contribution.
If you look back through my posts on here you will see I've said the same thing though - they have become much less a way of identifying skill and solely a revenue generator for the vendor, as can be evidenced by the rush every year to find people in partner organisations who can quickly pass the necessary exams to keep the accreditation level...
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