Introduction

Over the next five years, Russell will likely realize more than $5 million in savings from implementing Citrix software and an additional $4 million in future cost avoidance from outsourcing IT operations.

—Tom Hanly, Chief Financial Officer, Frank Russell Company

The complexity of information systems is driving the cost of enterprise computing out of control, frequently offsetting the business benefits derived from information technology. Consequently, in spite of continuing and rapid advances in IT, it is more difficult than ever before for IT organizations to provide consistency of service to all the places and people they must serve.

This is confirmed by a recent study of the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Analysis, which found that in 1965 less than 5 percent of the capital expenditures of U.S. companies went to IT. Early in the 1980s, when the PC was beginning to proliferate, the percentage grew to 15 percent. A decade later, the percentage had doubled, and by the late 1990s, IT costs were nearly half of all expenses of American corporations. But the amazing thing about these huge budgets is that they haven't led to a revolution in innovation or productivity; typically, 80 percent of a company's IT spending today goes toward just maintaining existing systems.

What's driving all this? Heterogeneity. Each successive wave of computing—mainframe, minicomputer, PC, client-server, the Web, web services—has not superseded previous waves but rather has been piled on top of what came before. Moreover, the diversity and proliferation of access devices, computing platforms, software languages, networks, standards, and application infrastructures have further complicated the picture, making the cost of computing more variable and more expensive than ever.

IT organizations are coping with these technical, economic, and business challenges through consolidation. They are reducing the number of moving parts by centralizing and consolidating as much of the heterogeneity and complexity as possible to fewer data centers, servers, and networks. Their goal is to migrate to a model that allows them to improve the level of service they provide to the business. To accomplish this, many are moving the complexity of computing to a central place where it can best be managed, controlled, and evolved over time. This makes everything outside the data center simpler to manage and more cost-effective to operate. It also dramatically improves information security and resilience to technological and business interruptions.

Access infrastructure for the on-demand enterprise provides a consistent user experience across a wide variety of access devices and easy, secure, and instant access to IT services—from anywhere. It allows heterogeneity to be managed centrally, and shields the user from the complexity of accessing heterogeneous information systems. It knows the user's identity and presents an interface that dynamically adjusts to the specific user's device, location, and preferences.

The MetaFrame Access Suite provides access infrastructure for the on-demand enterprise, which is built upon server-based computing; applications are executed on central server farms running Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services and Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server. Users see only screen prints of their applications displayed on a wide variety of devices, including handheld PDAs, PC tablet devices, Windows-based terminals, Macs, smart phones, Linux workstations, and traditional PCs. This computing paradigm also goes by several other names (with some variations in meaning), including server-centric computing, application serving, thin-client computing, ASP services, and simply Terminal Services. By providing organizations with the ability to quickly deploy a wide range of applications to users, regardless of their location, bandwidth constraints, or device, server-based computing has changed the way many organizations work today. Just as importantly though, server-based computing has reduced or eliminated the requirements for both PC upgrades and remote-office servers, thus allowing many organizations to minimize their ongoing capital expenditures and dramatically slash their administration costs.

Server-based computing is great. It's happening. It's part of our strategy.

—Steve Ballmer, Microsoft President, from the Wall Street Journal, July 21, 1999

Evolution of an Industry

According to Giga Information Group, in a report dated February 2002, nearly two-thirds of enterprise users surveyed by Giga have deployed server-based computing; 32 percent believe it is a strategic technology.

Citrix launched the industry in the late 1980s with the introduction of a multiuser OS/2 product called WinView. Over the last few years, a majority of large company IT departments have adopted server-based computing in some form to solve a variety of problems such as wide area deployment of applications, remote access, and access to Windows applications on non-Windows devices (such as UNIX and Mac desktops), but many of these deployments are tactical rather than strategic. This, however, is changing. As companies begin to experience the cost, efficiency, flexibility, and productivity benefits of the Citrix MetaFrame Access Suite on a tactical level, they are increasingly and strategically standardizing on Citrix access infrastructure over time.

Today, the server-based computing industry is enormous and includes scores of Windows terminal choices, bandwidth management devices, wireless connectivity options, and thousands of software partners, resellers, and consultants. Microsoft's incorporation of Terminal Services into Windows Server 2003, and its commitment to continue the rapid feature enhancement, usability, and partner community of Terminal Services is further validating server-based computing as a mainstream technology. We believe that with Citrix' ability to extend the Terminal Services application deployment foundation to enable the on-demand enterprise, and with the additional pressures of shrinking IT budgets, along with the need to ensure disaster recovery and comply with new, stringent government regulations, this rising tidal wave of computing change will continue to gain momentum and, in fact, will become a prominent paradigm in business computing throughout the next decade.

Note

Some readers took exception with our declaration of server-based computing becoming the new networking standard when we published the first edition of this book in July of 2000. Nearly 50 million people in over 120,000 organizations around the globe now utilize Citrix software, and 50 percent of surveyed customers consider Citrix their corporate standard for application deployment. We firmly believe that the overwhelming economic advantages make this continuing transition inevitable. Organizations that do not embrace the much greater efficiencies and strategic benefits that centralized computing enable will be at a competitive disadvantage.

In an enterprise implementation of Windows 2003 Terminal Services and Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server, most applications execute at one or more central data centers rather than on individual PCs. This entails a paradigm shift back to mainframe methodologies, procedures, and discipline, while still utilizing technology and environmental aspects unique to the PC world. It requires a much more resilient, reliable, and redundant network infrastructure than in a conventional client-server WAN. Myriad decisions must be made regarding building this infrastructure as well as several ancillary items such as choosing the right terminals, prioritizing WAN traffic, consolidating storage, enabling redundancy, and migrating from legacy systems.