Changes At the Moose

You may have noticed that there was no December issue of Moose Views. We apologize, but we’ve been pretty busy getting ready for the new year.

As we roll into 2012, there are a number of changes we’d like to draw your attention to. First (in case you didn't notice when the page loaded), we have a new Web site. It’s been quite a while in the making, but we think it does a better job of explaining what we do, as well as making it easier to navigate around the site, know where you are, and know how to find what you’re looking for.

We’d love to have you give us feedback on the new face of Moose Logic on the Web.

Second, we will be changing our phone numbers in the next few weeks, so please be on the lookout for more information on the new numbers. As part of our own journey to the cloud, we’re moving to a hosted VoIP system. (If it goes well, we’ll even tell you who our partner is!)

As many of you know, our engineers spend most of their time working out of their homes, when they’re not actually at a customer location. We believe the new system will make it easier for us to communicate with each other as well as easier to communicate with you and easier to handle incoming service calls.

Third, we continue to move ahead with our Moose Logic Cloud Services offerings. We’re currently on-boarding our first DaaS (Desktop-as-a-Service) customers, and we’ll have a lot more to say about the service in the weeks to come.

As time permits, we’re going to be migrating our own business systems into our cloud — it’s just that we’ve been pretty busy lately working on your systems. (Not that we’re complaining, we appreciate the opportunity to work with you!) But the point is that we’ve worked hard to put together cloud service offerings that are stable and reliable — the kinds of services that we’d be willing to run our own business on — and we fully intend to do so.

The cloud is not the ultimate solution to everything—but we believe that, if implemented properly, it can be a valuable addition to your business strategy, for things like:

• Off-site backup.
• Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity.
• Improved security.

….and, of course, we believe that many of you would be better off to get out of the server management business entirely and move everything to the cloud—hence our DaaS offering.

So stay tuned, it’s going to be an interesting year!

What's Ahead In 2012?

Another new year is upon us, and we find ourselves looking back on 2011 as well as gazing into the crystal ball to try to get a glimpse of what’s coming in 2012.

First, we’d like to say a big THANK YOU! to all of our customers. We probably don’t say it enough, but you are the reason we do what we do, and we know that if the day ever comes when we no longer bring value to your businesses, we will no longer be in business.

That quest to bring value has taken us to some interesting places in the past year, including the launch of our own Cloud Services offerings.

Our year went much like it went for many of you: business continues to rebound, but not as fast as we’d like to see it. 2012 may well be more of the same until the election gets sorted out and businesses know what to expect for the next four years.

But it’s probably also worthwhile to listen to the people whose business it is to make business predictions—so here’s what Gartner sees for the future of IT over the next few years:

• By 2015, “Industrial Low-Cost IT Services” (ILCS), a.k.a., low-cost cloud services, will eat into the revenue of the top IT outsourcing players. Gartner projects that they could lose as much as 15% of their revenue, and that vendors need to have a cloud-based strategy of their own to protect themselves.
• The “investment bubble” will burst in 2013 for consumer-oriented social networks, and in 2014 for enterprise-oriented social networks.
• By 2016, at least half of enterprise email users will primarily use a browser, tablet, or mobile client for email rather than a desktop system.
• The application development ecosystem will continue to shift toward smartphones and tablets. By 2015, there will be four times as many mobile development projects as PC development projects.
• By 2016, 40% of enterprises will insist on proof of independent security testing for any cloud service they are considering using.
• By the end of 2016, more than half of the Global 1000 companies will have customer-sensitive data stored in the public cloud.
• Many companies that serve the U.S. market will shift sources of supply from Asia to the Americas, because of political, economic, and supply chain risks. By 2014, this shift could amount to 20% of the finished goods and assemblies currently sourced in Asia.
• The financial impact of cybercrime will continue to grow 10% per year through 2016.
• By 2015, 80% of cloud services will include an energy surcharge in their pricing package.
• The volume of data available to us will continue to explode, but even the largest enterprises will struggle to collect, analyze, and present it in ways that will let them effectively exploit it for competitive advantage.

One thing we can be sure of is that technology will continue to change and evolve. It seems like the pace of evolution gets faster every year! And one thing we can promise is that Moose Logic will continue to be here to help you chart your course through all of those changes.

Let us know how we can help you.

Here's to You!

Here are some of our favorite toasts from Ireland that you can use to liven up your next party:

May misfortune follow you the rest of your life, but never catch up.

A toast to your coffin: May it be made of 100-year-old oak, and may we plant the tree together, tomorrow.

May you never lie, cheat, or drink. But if you must lie, lie in each other’s arms. If you must cheat, cheat death. And if you must drink, drink with all of us because we love you.

May the best day of your past be the worst day of your future.

May you live as long as you want, and never want as long as you live.

May the Lord keep you in his hand, and never close His fist too tight.

May you have warm words on a cold evening, a full moon on a dark night, and the road downhill all the way to your door.

May your glass be ever full; may the roof over your head be always strong; and may you be in heaven half an hour before the devil knows you’re dead.

May those that love us, love us. And those that don’t love us, may God turn their hearts. And if he doesn’t turn their hearts, may he turn their ankles, so we’ll know them by their limping.

Citrix CloudGateway Released

Depending on what you were doing over New Year's weekend, you may have missed the release of the new Citrix CloudGateway. But it’s a pretty cool concept, and it will ultimately change the way we all get to our Citrix-powered infrastructures, so let’s take a quick look at it.

CloudGateway comes in two editions: Express Edition, and Enterprise Edition. Express Edition is free to licensed users of XenApp or XenDesktop. Enterprise Edition requires user licensing, and can be licensed in a per-user or a concurrent-user mode.

Both editions use the new Citrix Receiver Storefront, which replaces the old Web Interface that we grew to know and love. Storefront runs on IIS, on a Windows 2008 R2 SP1 server.

With a traditional Web Interface server, you created a Web Interface site, and when a user authenticated to that site, the user was presented with a Web page populated with the applications that user had the rights to access.

You could also create a “PN Agent” site (the name was a holdover from the old “Program Neighborhood Agent” that the newer Receiver On-line Plugin could authenticate to behind the scenes, and pull those applications into the Start menu, or have them appear if you clicked the System Tray icon.

With Storefront, you first create a “store.” That store will pull in desktops and applications from XenApp or XenDesktop farms, and from the new AppController virtual appliance (more on that shortly).

A Windows client with the latest Receiver and the Self-service plug-in can authenticate directly against the Storefront, and allow the users to subscribe to the applications they want—rather than having every app that’s available to them get pushed down to them.

Their choices are recorded in the store, and if they subsequently log on from a different Windows client that also has the Self-service plug-in, their choices will automatically be synchronized with the new client device.

For non-Windows clients, or for Windows clients that don’t have the latest version of Receiver, you can create a “Receiver for Web” site that is accessible from a browser much like the old Web Interface...except that the new Receiver for Web also supports the application self-service function.

The Enterprise Edition includes a virtual appliance (that currently runs on XenServer or VMware) called the AppController. It is an aggregation point for Web and SaaS applications like SharePoint, Dropbox, OWA, Salesforce.com, etc. In fact, there’s an app catalog on the Citrix Web site that lists over 100 applications that are already supported.

Those applications can also be aggregated into the store that’s presented via the Storefront server, and part of the magic is that the AppController will provide single sign-on to those applications.

In fact, you can even build provisioning workflow into it. For example, a user could request access to Salesforce.com, and, if access is approved, AppController could automagically create the account for that user. And if the user leaves the organization, AppController can de-provision the user account and recover the license.

All indications are that this will also be the engine that powers the “follow-me data” feature that Citrix demonstrated at the last couple of Synergy conferences, although there’s nothing about that in the documentation for the initial release. My expectation is that we will soon see support for ShareFile (which Citrix recently acquired) as the cloud storage repository that will allow you to synchronize files across multiple client devices.

CloudGateway Enterprise licenses list for $150 per named user, or $300 per concurrent user. There’s no word yet on whether any of this Enterprise functionality will be rolled into the Platinum Editions of either XenApp or XenDesktop, or will continue to be a completely separately-licensed product.

There is also an annual license available ($65/user or $130/concurrent user) for those who prefer OpEx to CapEx for license acquisitions, or just want to try it for a while.

We will continue to track and report further developments as news becomes available, because we believe this is a major shift in how Citrix customers will get to applications and data in the future.

Days to Fly the American Flag

According to federal law, there are specific days that the U.S. flag should be displayed. While it is encouraged to fly the flag every day, these days are specially designated for display of the flag:

• New Year’s Day
• Inauguration Day
• Martin Luther King Jr.’s Birthday (celebrated 3rd Monday in January)
• Lincoln’s Birthday (February 12)
• President’s Day (3rd Monday in February)
• Easter Sunday
• Mother’s Day
• Armed Forces Day (third Saturday in May)
• Memorial Day, with flag at half-staff until noon
• Flag Day (June 14)
• Independence Day (July 4)
• Labor Day
• Constitution Day (September 17)
• Columbus Day (2nd Monday in October)
• Navy Day (October 27)
• Veteran’s Day (November 11)
• Thanksgiving Day
• Christmas Day
• Election Days
• Any other day proclaimed by the President of the United States.