Business Tech

With billions in stimulus dollars available to help doctors and hospitals digitize their health records, it stands to reason that tech companies want to make spending that money as easy as possible.

Several of the players--Allscripts, Cisco, Citrix, Dell, Intel, Intuit, Microsoft, and Nuance Communications--have teamed up in an alliance aimed at educating doctors on the many tools available to help set up electronic health records.

The EHR Stimulus Alliance is pulling out all the stops, with a road tour, Webcasts, telephone hotline, and other tools all aimed at demystifying the technology and showing case studies of where it has worked.

President Obama's stimulus package provides on the order of $20 billion for health care technology, with the central focus being nudging hospitals and doctors to move their records from manila folders to computers. Even with the money, though, it's seen as a daunting task.

"The EHR Stimulus Alliance is a unified movement toward turning the national dialogue surrounding the EHR transition into action," Nuance Healthcare President John Shagoury said in a statement. "Each of the partners involved has unique solutions that are crucial to EHR implementation. In our case, because most doctors speak at least three times faster than they type, speech recognition technology helps increase the meaningful use and efficiency of EHRs by decreasing physician reliance on the keyboard and mouse."

The alliance hopes to reach half a million doctors with its message.

Although the alliance represents a number of the big names in tech, there are a lot of other players in the electronic health records business, including Cerner, General Electric, eClinicalWorks, McKesson, and NextGen, as well as start-ups such as Medsphere. Other tech players also pushing hard for their piece of the industry include IBM and storage giant EMC.

Citrix has introduced updates to XenServer, its free virtualization platform, and to Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V, its virtualization management package.

The new 5.5 release of XenServer, which Citrix began offering as a free download in February, is designed to provide easier virtualization management and broader integration with enterprise systems, the company said in its announcement Wednesday. This includes hooks that allow third-party products to interact with XenServer to provide full or incremental in-guest, file backups of virtual machines. Image backups are supported too.

In addition, it lets admins carry out GUI-based snapshots from the XenCenter management console.

The update supplies new tools to convert virtual machines from VMware's VMDK format into the VHD format used by Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V. It also lets them switch between common open virtualisation format packages.

In addition, new search facilities give admins a range of ways to locate virtual machines, while Active Directory integration brings XenServer hosts into the enterprise's information repository.

The list of supported guests has grown in the new version of XenServer to include Suse Linux Enterprise Server 11, Debian 5.0 and RedHat/CentOS/Oracle 5.3.

As for Citrix Essentials for XenServer and Hyper-V, the new 5.5 version adds the ability to clone and provision XenServer or Microsoft Hyper-V-based virtual machines across physical and virtual resources. It also allows third-parties to deliver unified backup and snapshot features for the VMs.

Citrix said the Essentials update also simplifies the process of building, testing, sharing and delivering applications throughout an application's life cycle, including the ability to develop and test environments across virtualization platforms. According to Citrix, it also extends XenServer's XenMotion features by enabling automated movement of live virtual machines across servers based on preset rules and thresholds, so reducing performance bottlenecks.

The beta version of the new Citrix XenServer 5.5 is available for download now, with the final version scheduled for release on June 19. Citrix Essentials 5.5 for XenServer and Hyper-V is available now for download in a beta version and a 30-day trial version. It will also be released on June 19, with prices starting at $2,500 per server, regardless of the number of processors.

On Wednesday, Citrix also unveiled NetScaler VPX, a virtual appliance version of its NetScaler MPX hardware appliance that is designed to accelerate and secure enterprise web applications. It can be installed on commodity hardware, the company said. It added that the move should allow smaller companies to access its technology because the software appliance can be downloaded from the net and run on a standard server, making it cheaper to buy.

The company is pitching NetScaler VPX for use by enterprises and cloud service providers as an on-demand service, as virtual machines can be deployed quickly deployed as demand increases. The company has not yet announced prices.

Manek Dubash of ZDNet UK reported from London.

LAS VEGAS--The Day One keynotes at Citrix Synergy 2009 were about users and desktops. Today was nominally about data centers and clouds--of which there were a variety of announcements. However, Citrix's XenClient ("Project Independence") loomed large as well.

Of the products discussed on stage, XenClient is perhaps furthest from being a fully realized product. But is also offers an intriguing window into how the PC as we know it is likely to fundamentally change over the coming years.

XenClient is a "Type 1" native hypervisor that sits on a PC and hosts one or more guest operating systems. This approach contrasts with the "Type 2" hosted hypervisors that are far more common on PCs today.

There are good reasons why we tend to see native hypervisors on servers and hosted hypervisors on desktops. Native hypervisors are higher performance, especially when it comes to interacting with networks and disks. As a result, it wasn't until native hypervisors like VMware ESX Server and Xen came to market that x86 virtualization started to seriously move beyond useful but relatively narrow uses such as in test and development labs.

The downside of native hypervisors is that, because they sit directly on top of a system's hardware, they have to take over a variety of the functions that an operating system usually performs. For example, a native hypervisor has to deal with things like power management and needs to know how to talk to graphics cards and chips, network and storage adapters, and other system hardware.

(Depending upon the virtualization architecture in question, some device interactions can be passed through to the guest operating systems, but the point remains that a native hypervisor is exposed to hardware details and idiosyncrasies that are masked if the hypervisor is hosted on an operating system.)

The great diversity of client hardware relative to server hardware therefore makes running native hypervisors on a PC tricky business.

It's also been the case that vendors haven't exactly pushed client-side virtualization--in contrast to using application virtualization to deliver software to clients--in a broad way. Hosted virtualization products handle specific use cases such as security (VMware ACE), running Windows applications on Macs (Parallels Desktop for Mac, VMware Fusion), and software development (VirtualBox, VMware Workstation). Start-ups are also tackling the security angle with alternative approaches. RingCube uses containers. Neocleus uses a Xen-based native hypervisor.

But no large vendor has seriously pushed a broad-based Type 1 hypervisor for the client. Microsoft, for its part, has been publicly skeptical about the idea. (Not especially surprising given that Microsoft has only reluctantly embraced virtualization--in part because native virtualization takes over some of the traditional tasks of the operating system.)

That changes with XenClient, a project that Citrix has collaborated on closely with Intel.

Here's how Citrix describes XenClient and its vision for desktop computing:

XenClient is a strategic product initiative with partners like Intel, focused on local virtual desktops. We are working together to deliver on our combined vision for the future of desktop computing.

This new virtualization solution will extend the benefits of hosted desktop virtualization to millions of mobile workers with the introduction of a new client-side bare metal hypervisor that runs directly on each end user's laptop or PC. This together with an innovative back-end desktop management solution for creating, delivering, and updating corporate desktop computing environments will transform the way corporate desktops are delivered and managed, giving IT all the security, simplicity and cost savings of centralized management, with an unprecedented level of performance, personalization and freedom for end users.

To net it out, Citrix is pushing for a future in which a hypervisor is a standard abstraction layer for every cleint and server--just the way that x86 architectures of all stripes are architected and built. Think of it as a BIOS on steroids if you will.

Citrix's interest here is obvious. After all, its strategy is to make money from managing virtualized environments. Thus, continuing with a theme from Synergy's first day, XenClient--like XenServer--will be free when made available later this year.

Intel's interest here is that XenClient is specifically targeted for systems with vPro technology. vPro includes:

• Intel Virtualization Technology (VT)--hardware assists for improved virtualization performance
• Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT)--formerly called LaGrande, provides hardware-based rooted security
• Intel Active Management Technology (AMT)--hardware management technology

Intel's Pat Gelsinger said in his keynote that vPro is ramping quickly--he claimed it was in 60 percent of the Fortune 100--but Intel is doubtless actively seeking more reasons to get businesses to upgrade to their latest and greatest client platforms.

The vision here seems a sound one. After all, IT vendors have essentially been adding layers of abstraction to mask complexity since the beginning. Even an operating system is an example of abstraction (actually many of them rolled into one software package). And use cases involving personal PCs used to access corporate networks or protected VMs that run security scanners seem far less esoteric than they did even just a couple of years back.

The question is more one of time frame. When do compelling uses get made available by software vendors in largely transparent ways for end users who are not developers or otherwise ready, willing, and able to explicitly manipulate multiple virtual machines on a single client? It isn't this year but there's a lot of reason to believe that this is the direction the client is headed.

LAS VEGAS--The consumerization of the Web will be as disruptive to distributed computing as distributed computing was to the mainframe. That was the central theme of Citrix Systems CEO Mark Templeton's keynote speech at this week's Synergy 2009 conference.

Mark Templeton, CEO, Citrix Systems

(Credit: Citrix)

This is an oversimplification, of course. Over the years, companies have run their business software in many different ways--not all of which are easily categorized as either mainframe-like or PC-like. One whole era of computing architectures during roughly the 1980s commonly went by the term "client-server." However, if we think of how distributed computing in the enterprise has evolved, this broad-brush statement makes a lot of sense.

That's because the enterprise PC isn't really a personal computer any longer. The administrative and security requirements around desktop and notebook devices running an increasingly complex stew of locally installed software have seen to that. In many enterprises, they're stringently locked down as a way to protect their often fragile software payloads from corruption.

This is a drum that virtualization and cloud-computing specialist Citrix has been pounding for quite a while. Writing after Citrix iForum (Synergy's predecessor) in November 2007, I noted:

We've seen and heard a lot of praise for the democratic impulse associated with this particular phase of computing that often goes by the Web 2.0 moniker. Anyone can post. Anyone can publish. Anyone can photograph. Your vote matters in social media.

And alternative ways of accessing and running applications have indeed made it easier to do things outside of a strict IT framework. In his closing iForum keynote, Citrix CEO Mark Templeton used the phrase "making the personal computer personal again" for this idea.

It's perhaps not too surprising that the proffered solution to this problem is a variety of technologies that Citrix collectively describes as application delivery. The framework to think about it is something like a satellite TV system. A controller, a delivery network, and a receiver transmit and receive the bits; they do so independently of the actual end-point device (i.e. the TV) and the content, so long as those adhere to certain interface standards.

One could use such an architecture to deliver enterprise applications to a truly personal notebook, an employee's personal system rather than an IT asset. Although still relatively uncommon in an enterprise context when it comes to PCs, it's a fairly common model with smartphones, though we're starting to see the beginnings of such an approach in the PC space too.

What this means specifically in a Citrix environment is that Citrix Delivery Center "head-end controllers" such as XenApp and XenDesktop advertise services--that is, applications that are available for users to run. New services or service updates are then loaded or streamed to a client.

One of Tuesday's major announcements was Citrix Receiver, which the company describes as "the first universal client for IT service delivery":

Under the hood, Citrix Receiver is a lightweight universal software client with an extensible browser-like "plug-in" architecture. Receiver comes standard with a variety of optional plug-ins that communicate with head-end infrastructure in the Citrix Delivery Center product family such as XenApp, XenDesktop, Citrix Access Gateway, and Branch Repeater.

These plug-ins support functionality such as online and offline app usage, virtual-desktop delivery, secure access control, password management, app acceleration, multimedia acceleration, service-level monitoring, and voice communications. This model enables IT to effectively operate as a service provider to their own employees, proactively and transparently monitoring end-user experience from a central location.

Receiver is available for Windows, Macs, and iPhones. Citrix also plans to support Windows Mobile and Symbian operating systems. It's also working with Open Kernel Labs to support Android. In all cases, Receiver is free.

In general, as with XenServer, Citrix' strategy is to make its money from the management and delivery software infrastructure rather than all of the base-level components.

The final announcement of the day was Dazzle. It's built on top of Receiver and accesses the same head-end services. It is, in a sense, Citrix application delivery meets Web 2.0.

I mean that in a somewhat metaphorical sense. But Dazzle is a self-service application store for employees that very deliberately and consciously mimics the conventions and approach of something like the iTunes Store. Web 2.0 and cloud-computing attributes, like self-service, device independence, and remote access are what help so many consumer applications make traditional enterprise apps look a bit shopworn by comparison.

And that's what Mark Templeton was talking about when he said the enterprise application delivery model is being disrupted by the consumer Web.

This was originally posted at ZDNet's Between the Lines.

Citrix said Tuesday it will add Web 2.0 push technology to its NetScaler traffic management and content delivery lineup.

Why? Because Web 2.0 apps are gobbling up more and more server computing power.

As rich Internet applications proliferate, data centers are becoming less efficient because they must stay connected to servers 24/7 to be useful. Those connections gobble up computing power.

Indeed, all of those widgets and Web 2.0 apps may translate in new racks of servers that need to be purchased.

Citrix said it will add a feature to NetScaler to push data to users so that software doesn't have to go to a server to get it. This is designed to offload the strain on servers.

Citrix said in a statement:

While Web 2.0 applications are ushering in a new era of enhanced functionality and responsiveness for end users, they are highly inefficient when it comes to server computing resources. In order to create a rich interactive experience, Web 2.0 applications need to maintain a one-to-one user connection to backend servers for extended periods, which severely taxes data center resources and adversely impacts performance and scalability.

That's an interesting point considering a lot of people probably haven't pondered how Web 2.0 apps can drain servers. Citrix said its aiming to lower server costs by 5 to 10 times the current levels by proactively pushing data to "create the illusion of real-time interaction."

ESG virtualization guru Mark Bowker is keeping me abreast of the goings-on at VMworld Europe in Cannes. In between the merlot and brie, Microsoft and Citrix announced an interesting and potentially lucrative partnership for server virtualization and virtualization management dubbed "Project Encore."

Here's the deal. In spite of its recent release of Hyper-V, Microsoft remains behind VMware in terms of enterprise management features. To bridge this gap, Microsoft is teaming with Citrix to offer advanced server virtualization management through Citrix Essentials. Citrix Essentials builds on Hyper-V with management capabilities for storage management, physical/virtual server provisioning, and lab management automation. Both companies will offer Citrix Essentials through their channels.

The benefits of this partnership could be immediate and profound:

• Microsoft closes the functionality gap with VMware and can thus focus on getting its hypervisor installed everywhere. The goal? Make Hyper-V the Windows of hypervisors.

• Citrix follows Microsoft with advanced management capabilities that are tightly linked to its products. Citrix Essentials goes beyond Hyper-V support to provide some cool orchestration capabilities for XenServer, XenApp, and XenDesktop as well.

So does this mean that Citrix has given up on its own hypervisor? Not at all. In fact, Citrix just announced an aggressive program of its own to give away XenServer with central management and live motion support. Obviously, Citrix wants to build a beachhead of its own.

VMware is still the enterprise incumbent but this announcement may add pricing and margin pressure immediately. With the stock market and consumer confidence in the toilet, it is hard to argue with Windows economics and free hypervisors.

Citrix on Monday upped competition in the virtualization market with the announcement that it will provide a version of its XenServer hypervisor for free.

The software will be available for download by the end of March from Citrix's Web site, the company said. Users can get a single server instance of XenServer, said Simon Crosby, chief technical officer at Citrix. The release will include multinode management, resource sharing between several servers and full live-motion features.

However, Crosby told ZDNet UK that the free edition "will not include some features that we will continue to monetize."

Not included will be Workflow Studio orchestration, which is a tool used for automating common tasks, and StorageLink, which allows managers to directly provision virtual machines. To get these, users will have to buy Citrix's Essentials for XenServer package, which is priced at $1,500 (1,000 British pounds) for the Enterprise Edition, and $5,000 for Platinum Edition.

Jason Greschler, director of systems center management at Citrix's longtime partner Microsoft, said: "We welcome this move, which is in line with our ethos that these tools should be fast, free, compatible and ubiquitous."

Microsoft already offers its own hypervisor, Hyper-V, for free, together with a cut-down Server Core installation of Microsoft's Windows Server 2008.

Also on Monday, Citrix announced a deepening of its collaboration with Microsoft on server virtualization, in an effort called "Project Encore." The first results of this project will be the release of Citrix Essentials for Microsoft Hyper-V on 7 April. The virtualization management package will include tools such as storage integration and hypervisor interoperability for virtual machines based on both Hyper-V and XenServer.

"We see Citrix Essentials as a powerful extension that enables customers to accelerate their Hyper-V adoption in the enterprise in much the same way Citrix XenApp has extended the Windows Server platform for nearly 20 years in the application delivery arena. Microsoft also will work to ensure that a future release of Microsoft System Center will support Citrix XenServer for customers with mixed Hyper-V and XenServer environments," Mike Neil, general manager of virtualization strategy at Microsoft, said in a statement.

The Citrix announcements came the day before the start of VMworld Europe, a conference sponsored by and closely associated with VMware, the market leader in virtualization software. VMware also offers a free hypervisor package, based on its ESXi product.

Virtualization is growing fast, according to analyst firm Gartner, which has predicted that global revenue from virtualization software will grow by 43 percent in 2009, hitting $2.7 billion, compared with $1.9 billion in 2008.

Colin Barker of ZDNet UK reported from London.

Citrix Systems, the business software company behind the Xen hypervisor, said it plans to cut 10 percent of jobs despite being "pleased" with its fourth-quarter results.

Overall revenue for the fourth quarter increased from $400 million (300 million pounds) to $416 million, the company said on Wednesday, even though revenue from product licenses fell by 9 percent. Revenue from license updates was up by 13 percent, and online service revenue grew by 18 percent compared with the same quarter the previous year. Net income for the fourth quarter was $60 million, calculated on a GAAP basis, a drop from $63 million.

The application-delivery infrastructure specialist also reported financial results for the full 2008 year. Annual revenue went from $1.39 billion in 2007 to $1.58 billion, a rise of 14 percent. Net income was $178 million, compared with $214m for 2007.

"I'm pleased with our fourth-quarter results and performance for 2008, especially in the face of an extraordinary worldwide environment," said Mark Templeton, chief executive of Citrix, in a statement.

At the same time, Citrix announced that it was starting a "restructuring program and steps to reduce (the company's) headcount by approximately 10 percent." That is equivalent to approximately 490 staff.

Citrix saw a slight decline in part of its Xen virtualization business. Of the three Xen divisions--Xen App, Xen Server, and Xen desktop--one, XenApp, saw a fall in sales of three percent in the fourth quarter, compared with the same time last year.

"Overall, the Xen business looks very healthy," James Stephenson, Citrix's area vice president for the UK, Ireland, and South Africa told ZDNet.co.uk. "What we saw was the same as everybody else, which is the business doing well until the third quarter this year."

Stephenson said that the other two Xen divisions--Xen Server and Xen Desktop--grew by 40 percent over the same quarter last year.

Colin Barker of ZDNet UK reported from London.

It's been a year since Citrix bought XenSource, the company created by the founders of the Xen open-source hypervisor, and integrated the business into its lineup of products delivering applications to desktops.

As part of the process, Citrix made the XenServer virtualization software central to its strategy, and appointed XenSource staff to senior executive positions.

ZDNet UK sat down with one of those executives, Ian Pratt, Citrix's vice president for special products, to find out how the integration is going and where Citrix is going with Xen-branded products.

Ian Pratt, vice president, Citrix

In the second half of our two-part interview, Pratt talks about the impact of the Citrix takeover, the competitiveness and future of Xen, and more generally about the prospects for virtualization in a recession. (For part one, see "Q&A: Citrix exec says cloud to carry Xen against VMware.")

Tell me what's been happening in the past year. You've gone from being an independent company to becoming part of Citrix. But from the outside, it sometimes looks more as if Xen has taken over Citrix. Half the company's products have been renamed--Metaframe became XenApp and Desktop Server became Xen Desktop--Simon Crosby is now chief technology officer, and you're vice president for advanced products.
Pratt: Well, we've benefited from a larger channel. There are 5,000 people selling Citrix. But we don't immediately get 20 times the volume--there's a lot of training to be done. XenSource has been doubling sales every quarter, quite happily. Now as a start-up, we thought we expected to multiply by 100 every quarter, but doubling our sales is just fine.

We are seeing real benefits from integrating with the Citrix technology. We can make sure that (Citrix's) Xen Desktop works well with XenServer, for example. XenSource is now a new division in Citrix, for virtualization management. The chief executive (Peter Levine) is now a senior vice president--and both Simon and I report to him.

In fact, we haven't changed that much. There is more process in a bigger company, but from an engineering point of view, we are the same set of folks who wake up every morning wanting to stick it to VMware. We still have a start-up feeling.

Have you been asked to become more commercial? Have you had to go over to "the dark side"?
Pratt: In Citrix, we have not been asked to do anything against our genes. The open-source community has no problem with what we are doing.

Xen.org is being run the same way as it was before--but one thing Citrix has done is to fund a full-time project manager for Xen.org. If Xen got a bad reputation it would not in any way help Citrix.

It's not the only open-source hypervisor, though. Red Hat has been talking of the advantages of KVM, having bought Qumranet, its creator. Among other things, they say it will have long-term benefits from being integrated upstream with the Linux kernel.
Pratt: KVM is an add-on to the Linux kernel. It's hosted, not a true Type 1 hypervisor. It can never be a true Type 1 hypervisor. (Editors note: A Type 1 hypervisor runs on the bare metal of the server, while a Type 2 hypervisor is hosted on an operating system. Both VMware ESX and Microsoft Hyper-V are Type 1 hypervisors.)

With KVM you have the whole of Linux in the trusted layer. That includes device drivers and so on. And that is bad.

We also have broader support. You don't have to have Linux to run Xen. It runs on Solaris or BSD. KVM requires Linux.

Does virtualization itself still have good prospects? Is it the recession-proof part of IT?
Pratt: Everyone is doing it, and they are still doing it. Virtualization is a mature technology and the benefits to the bottom line are clear. You do it to save money, and people will continue doing that. The savings are immediate.

Having said that, some use cases may get pushed further out. For instance, some green sales may get delayed, where the motivation is partly reducing carbon footprint.

That's just where the company's IT power budget isn't reported clearly, surely?
Pratt: Yes. If the chief information officer's budget includes energy usage, then the company is more likely to deploy virtualization. But there are still plenty of companies where energy is treated separately, as part of the facilities budget.

So virtualization isn't absolutely recession-proof. Nothing is. But it has very good prospects.

Now is a good time to have a product that is a better value of solution. It's not a good time to be buying Rolls Royces. It's time to be buying Priuses. (Editors note: Earlier, Chief Technology Officer Simon Crosby compared Xen to a Toyota Prius and VMware to a Rolls Royce.)

As vice president for advanced products, what are you looking at?
Pratt: Client virtualization is an area I'm spending time on. It's an area where Xen leads--despite some bluster from VMware. It's an area where we can make a difference, and it will be driven by application delivery.

There will be virtualized smartphones on the market in the not-too-distant future. ARM has built virtualization into its processors; they didn't put that in for fun.

Virtualization in the embedded market will follow a similar playbook to virtualization in the x86 market. Client virtualization is going to happen quite quickly. It won't go through the phase where users have to choose their virtualization solution, because virtualization won't exist as a category. It will be part of the device when you buy it.

My other main area of interest is cloud computing. Between client and cloud, I have quite enough to do. They are both areas where Xen is a leader, and historically any area that wins on the client, ends up winning on the server.

A Xen presence on clients will bolster what we are doing on the server. And the cloud will help Xen, because it makes it easier to move virtual machines into the cloud. It will be possible to bridge from the cloud to the enterprise, so resources can be added dynamically.

Why pay for machines in the server room, when you can push them out into the cloud? In particular, functions like test and development, and disaster recovery, can be in the cloud. And if that cloud and the server room are both Xen, then it is much easier to do.

Peter Judge of ZDNet UK reports from London.