Freeing IT from the end point

Distinctions in client hardware will soon be irrelevant, allowing IT to focus on app delivery

No one can say exactly when it will happen or which company will be the first to do it, but at some point in the next, say, five years, when a new employee comes on board, the CTO will show up with a $1,000 voucher in hand. “Buy whatever you want,” the IT exec will say. “It doesn’t matter to IT whether it’s a desktop or a laptop, a PC or a Mac.”

What the CTO may not bother to explain to the new hire is that IT has gotten out of the client hardware support business. Now it is all about application delivery.

IT owns your workspace. You own your hardware.

If you can’t imagine this happening at your company, think for a moment about the consumer space, says Zeus Kerravala, senior analyst at Yankee Group. Look at MySpace or Google. Those Web sites simply provide a mechanism for facilitating communication. Similarly, IT will transform from an organization that manages thousands of desktops to one that facilitates the flow of information.

Perhaps the most immediate driver of this trend is Microsoft Vista and Office 7. Companies are trying to avoid the disruption of installing new systems with new images planted on them, not to mention the expense of buying bigger iron to accommodate these giant apps, says Natalie Lambert, senior analyst at Forrester Research. The solution? Stream the entire desktop environment over the network. Cutting-edge now, this practice will be mainstream within a couple of years.

As business is increasingly conducted over the Web, there are other application delivery issues even more important than Office 7 that IT needs to focus on.

Think of virtualization, SaaS (software as a service), Web 2.0, and the Internet as a business collaboration tool. Application delivery bubbles to the surface as the key driver in all of these technologies, says Andi Mann, senior analyst at Enterprise Management Associates. On top of that, you can add mobile technology and the growing need to send more and more complex applications to remote users.

If I can flip the usual cliche on its ear, you might say that, for IT, as one door opens — freeing it from having to support PCs — another door closes — trapping it into supporting a far more complex network that runs a lot more complex hardware and software.

Of the many vendors I spoke with about this topic, Citrix best exemplifies a company focused almost exclusively on application delivery.

The Citrix Presentation Server was one of the first to virtualize and stream Windows apps to a thin client. Back in 1990, Presentation Server was in essence a big projector. It has since morphed and can now isolate an app from Windows and stream it using only the components of the OS required to run the program. Code-named Tarpon, the current version allows a user to run incompatible applications on the same system — those that require different DLL files, for example, or an old and a new version of Photoshop.

But IT will need much more than the latest version of Presentation Server if it wants to hand out those vouchers. It will need an end-to-end infrastructure built for delivering a wide array of applications, not to mention the ability to deliver distinct, personalized desktop environments to the end points, according to Wes Wasson, vice president of worldwide marketing at Citrix.

That said, Citrix is reading the tea leaves, and its recent acquisitions are a good indicator of the kinds of hardware and software IT will soon have to manage.

Net 6, which Citrix acquired and renamed Citrix Access Gateway, adds security in the form of SSL and VPN technology. Citrix WANScaler, which comes from Citrix’s Orbital Data acquisition, accelerates application delivery to remote offices. And Citrix EdgeSight, from a company called Reflectant, provides performance monitoring at the client.

The complexity of applications, the protocols, the kinds of transactions, and the distance between the user and applications all have vastly different implications for the network and for the managers of the network.

Wasson says application delivery will be the defining IT issue of the next decade. From the looks of it, he is probably right.