The Halo Effect of Alliances

Cisco and Citrix have had a very strong Alliance over the last 7+ years. In that time Application and Desktop Virtualization have become a key workload in the data center. In fact, it’s helped change the way we work. Work is no longer a place, it’s what we do…no matter where we are or what device we are working on. What’s even better are the joint solutions that our engineering teams have developed that enable the changing nature of work. We have published dozens of Cisco Validated Designs, white papers, sizing guides, performance and interoperability testing. Cisco and Citrix have also developed one of the most elegant solutions on the planet to implement policy based orchestration. The Cisco ACI and Citrix NetScaler products work like a hand in a glove.

To be sure there is value in all of that…but that is not the best part of an Alliance. In my view the highest value comes from the cross-architecture solutions where we work to securely deliver your applications across an intent based network. That’s when Alliances truly shine…deep engineering integration and testing. The engineering teams are working together to solve very difficult IT problems. Any application, on any device, from any cloud. Securely. That’s not easy. It takes the intellectual capital of both companies working together to produce such a result. The Alliance creates the opportunity for value creation to flow throughout the solution portfolio. That’s the halo effect of an Alliance. Here are some examples.

Cisco at Citrix Synergy

Cisco will once again be a sponsor and exhibitor at the Citrix global customer conference, Synergy, in Anaheim next week. Come and see how the future works. We will be showcasing Intent Based Networking, Cloud Orchestration, Windows 10 full throttle graphics, and a choice of computing platforms. Check out this short video about our presence at Synergy. We will also have a 45 minute breakout session on Wednesday at 3:30 pm (SYN153). The title of the breakout is “Realize your future today with Cisco technologies”. In this session you will learn how Cisco and Citrix enables your applications in a Mulitcloud world. We will talk about Cisco HyperFlex, Cloud Orchestration, Analytics, and more…including two demos. Come join the conversation about what’s new with Cisco and you may walk away with an Apple iPad mini!

Is performance important to you?

A great example of the Alliance is joint engineering and performance testing. Here is a summary of a real customer problem that Cisco HyperFlex solved.

A large healthcare customer was having user complaints about the performance of their EMR application running on a competitive platform. They also had a support service level agreement that contained a performance metric resulting in $1.5M in support costs each year because of the poorly performing system. In comes HyperFlex. With the same number of compute nodes Cisco HyperFlex was not only able to meet the support SLA it was able to scale in a linear fashion saving the company a significant amount of operating expense.

Cisco HyperFlex with Citrix Cloud…the better together experience

Cisco and Citrix share complimentary visions of Multicloud with HyperFlex. Citrix CTO, Christian Reilly (@reillyUSA) said it best…”it’s a match made in heaven”. You can see his full video here including a whiteboard session explaining it. Our joint engineering teams are developing the next wave of solutions that will deliver on the promise of any app, any device, on any cloud. One of the more important solutions is Cisco HyperFlex with Citrix Cloud. This integration will dramatically enhance your ability to deploy Citrix workloads on HyperFlex. This solution provides a hybrid cloud desktop solution on top of the HyperFlex infrastructure.

You get all the benefits of having flexible on-prem hyperconverged infrastructure in your own data center managed by Citrix Cloud Services. In other words you keep your workloads safely on-prem with your data, and the control plane in the cloud. We constantly hear from our customers that they want the flexibility to scale their VDI environment as they grow. By combining HyperFlex’s linear performance scaling with Citrix cloud’s flexible subscription pricing model, we can deliver a truly flexible solution that meets our customers’ needs. We are excited to soon join the Citrix Ready HCI Workspace Appliance program and plan to deliver this new solution later this summer. Cisco HyperFlex with Citrix Cloud is truly the better together experience.

The halo effect of the Alliance has many facets. I have only discussed a few of them here. We are committed to the joint engineering effort required to deliver on the promise of Multicloud and Intent Based Networks. Visit with Cisco at our exhibit at Synergy May 8-10 in Anaheim. For more information about our solutions click here or follow me on Twitter @pteel.

See you in Anaheim!