Disclaimer: Moose Logic is a Citrix Solution Advisor, and the author has worked with Citrix products for well over a decade – which is about how long there have been Citrix products to work with. As a fan of the company and the technology, it’s sometimes difficult to be objective…but I’ll try.

Citrix has shown in the past that it is not afraid to make bold moves to shake up the market landscape. The most recent was the decision to make XenServer, the “type 1” hypervisor obtained through the acquisition of XenSource, free. With today’s announcement of XenDesktop 4, they’ve made another bold move – arguably the boldest and the most far-reaching retooling of their product line ever.

You can read the press release at the Citrix Web site, and also get all of the details of the new offerings there, as well as from the volumes that will be written in the blogosphere and trade press over the next few days. But the basics are as follows:

• XenDesktop, in all but it’s most basic version, will include XenApp. With a single XenDesktop license, you will be able to:
• Deploy a shared virtual desktop from a XenApp-equipped Terminal Server, or deliver published applications running on a XenApp-equipped Terminal Server.
• Connect to a virtual instance of a PC Operating System running on your choice of virtualization platforms (XenServer, Hyper-V, or VMware) – the classic definition of “VDI.”
• Connect to a blade PC, if your computing or graphics needs are so demanding that you need dedicated hardware.
• Stream a PC Operating System in real time to a desktop PC across the LAN – allowing you to boot and run your PCs from a common master image.
• Stream applications to XenApp servers, PCs (whether virtual or physical), or both, and, if necessary, cache them for off-line use.
• (Coming very soon) stream a PC Operating System to a client-side hypervisor, where it can be cached for off-line use.
• XenDesktop will be moving to a per-user license model – a major shift, since Citrix licensing has almost exclusively been based on concurrent use as long as anyone can remember. Sales of concurrent-use licenses for XenDesktop will be discontinued on November 16, when sales of XenDesktop 4 licenses begin.
• XenApp Enterprise and Platinum users with current Subscription Advantage will be offered a screaming “trade-up” deal that runs through June 30, 2010.
• Strategically speaking, XenApp is clearly taking the back seat compared to XenDesktop. It will continue to be sold in all existing editions, but is being repositioned as the best solution for customers with high user concurrency (greater than 2:1), or those who use it as a “point solution” (e.g., remote access over limited bandwidth connections, call center applications, etc.). This also is a huge shift, when you consider that XenApp is the product that made Citrix.

So…what’s behind these moves? Citrix clearly believes that the battle for control of desktop delivery is where the future of the company lies. WinFrame/MetaFrame/Presentation Server/XenApp has been the de facto standard for remote access and server-based computing for well over a decade. But if all you care about is deploying Terminal Services (a.k.a. Remote Desktop Services in Windows Server 2008 R2), the value proposition for adding XenApp to your Terminal Servers has been steadily declining – and with the new features of Windows Server 2008 R2, it declines even further. This is why Citrix has worked so hard to reposition the conversation as one about application delivery as opposed to remote access or server-based computing, and why they have continued to roll more features into XenApp – particularly the Platinum Edition, which is really a suite of products more than an edition of one product.

Now they are working to reposition the conversation yet again. Nearly everyone agrees that there will be a huge uptake of Windows 7 over the next couple of years. And as Brian Madden pointed out in a techtarget.com article recently: “…there’s no sense virtualizing your desktops just to end up with XP again. And when Windows 7 launches, there’s no sense migrating to it while still managing your desktops the ‘old’ way.” Clearly, the Windows 7 rollout is a perfect opportunity for organizations to rethink the way they deploy and manage desktops.

The message from Citrix is clear: Desktop virtualization does not equal VDI. VDI, as it is classically defined, is only one way to deliver a virtualized desktop. There are many other ways – which we listed at the top of this article – and all of them have perfectly valid use cases. Since Citrix has solutions that cover all of those ways, it makes sense to offer a single license that will allow customers to “mix and match” and choose the best virtualization solution for each use case.

As the old saying goes, “Nothing succeeds like success.” If this works out the way Citrix obviously hopes it will, it will, by definition, be viewed as one of the most brilliant marketing moves since the deal with Microsoft that led to MetaFrame. At the very least, I think it must be recognized as a pretty gutsy move. And it’s certainly going to be fun to watch.