Citrix adds Hypervisor Cloud to bring more and faster updates Citrix has added a development stream to its hypervisor that promises fast and frequent enhancements, plus a cloud service to deliver them to users. The Citrix Hypervisor 8 Cloud release stream is not designed to replace Citrix Hypervisor's Long Term Service releases, the last of which emerged in June 2020. Instead, the …
Disclaimer: despite the fact I used to work for Citrix, and hate them so much I need counselling, I can acknowledge the worth and usefulness of their products.
I don’t understand how Citrix could have gone so badly during covid and associated lockdowns, and the rise of extensive remote working. For a company whose bread and butter is remote working products, associated security and the like should have absolutely cleaned up. Now look at them. Seems like they are hoping Broadcom/VMware stuff things up worse than what they did and that the customers who migrated to VMware Horizon come back when Vmware decide they aren’t big enough to be customers anymore.
I partly agree with you but I think Citrix have always struggled with a direction, strategically. Back in the dial-up days they were, as you say, the company to give users access to applications remotely and for a while they were the only ones in the market.
Since then the move to hosted web apps / the shift to cloud has really hurt their market share.
NetScalers were a huge win for them but even there, competitors have caught up and passed them in many regards.
When they bought-without-buying (never did understand why they did it that way) Xen, they really could have made an impact in the virtualisation world but they never seemed to understand how to do it - I found everything in Citrix XenServer to be counterintuitive and clunky at best.
I did love their brief dalliance into a type-1 client hypervisor, XenClient, which at the time did fill a need I had for easy desktop virtualisation but then they dropped it suddenly (and to be fair it was always going to be a niche product). Interestingly, purely out of curiosity, I just had a play with OpenXT - it's basically the open sourced version of it - and it feels like stepping back in time a decade.
For three decades the question hung over Citrix of "when will Microsoft buy them". That has since morphed into "why would they?"
While the products in theory were good there was always too much rebranding, renaming and having to use other companies products because Citrix tools just weren’t up to it or were clunky.
I even wrote my own dashboard for their Citrix API because the dashboard built in to the Citrix console couldn’t be easily customised to show the data we wanted.
They bought other companies products but made no great effort to integrate them. Some of the Citrix tools still installed in their original developers folders and used their original Registry keys. That’s all fine after a purchase but when you then rebrand and rename all your products, at least change internal file names, directories and registry keys to match your shiny brand new product.
As for their documentation; a rebrand of their corporate website and all of a sudden all those useful articles on their website were no longer available. KB articles resulted in ‘not found’ on their website all because they rebranded and changed their logo and product range. Internally, very little about their product changed and the articles were mostly still valid but there were still those of us who hadn’t updated to the shiny newly named same old same old that needed those articles.
Some of their applications still looked like they had been written in Visual Basic for Windows for Workgroups and that was in 2021 when I last used Citrix XenDesktop, sorry Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops. Let’s not even talk about XenMobile. Sorry, I mean Endpoint Management. Or is it all just part of ‘Citrix Workspace’ now? Obviously I don’t mean ‘Citrix Workspace App’ because that’s the new name for Citrix Receiver.
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