I don’t think of myself as an evangelist or purist in any technology. I am known to some as Mr Agnostic and others as the egotist with a love for Citrix Technologies, I guess that depends on who is in the selling chair. But I do love tech, in all its forms and functions.

Normally I have some well formed ideas, I have been known to speak about them at length, but after listening to Andrew Morgan and Jarian Gibson on frontline chatter talk to Gunnar Berger from Citrix I finally heard from the CTO of Apps and Desktops a whisper of something that I’ve been pushing towards in my own job. Namely forget windows desktops and instead focus on the device apps.

My role in Another 9 is to help us to provide Desktops as a Service and Mobile Management as a Service with a mix of public/private and hybrid cloud deployments. But I’ve never felt happy to see this as Multitenant VDI and to focus on the Desktop delivery as key. When I set up Mobile Device Management (MDM) as a Service I couldn’t help but see something beautiful hidden in the architecture. My plan became simple, provide Enterprise Mobile Management (EMM) as a Service and if the device needs windows apps, then give them XenApp as an add-on.

Theres a “pivot” here … 

somewhere

From my previous role as a Consultant I focused on the Workspace\Desktop and I am guilty of focusing on the Virtual desktop technology, leaving the user device to last. Sure we could make “Citrix” work on anything, a PC, Tablet, Phone, Thin Client and even on those artsy OSX devices. With XM10 integrated MDM and Apps I began to realise the importance of the focus on the device. This change in my approach as putting the device first and providing the device with the right application to its needs, started a shift in thinking that I have only now fully realised, and it’s pretty cool.

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