During its annual Synergy event held in Los Angeles, Citrix announced a new soluiton called Citrix Workspace Services (CWS). CWS offers deployment of virtual workspaces, mobile device management and collaboration tools from a cloud based service. With this announcement Citrix is clearly coming with an answer to VMware’s recent Horizon Suite and Airwatch product announcements offering similar functionality. Citrix also announced a 50 percent discount for customers currently using VMware Horizon and View and willing to switch to this new solution.
Citrix Workspace Services promises automation of the setup, configuration, and on-going management of Citrix products on any cloud or on premise infrastructure. It uses standardized expert-defined deployment architecture blueprints for Citrix workloads which can be deployed using the the automated provisioning capabilities of Citrix Workspace Services. CWS offers auto-scaling and auto-recovery post deployment using technology acquired from ScaleXtreme for which Citrix announced it has acquired. ScaleXtreme offers technology providing: Server & Application Monitoring, Patch Management and Automation.
On another note, by acquiring ScaleXtreme, Citrix announced that it will shutdown the service within 45 days, existing customers are advised to implement another solution within that timeframe and Citrix offers no migrationpath from the current solution to the new CWS solution, for which it receives a lot of critic. From that point Citrix will most probably rebrand the ScaleXtreme service to the CWS solution.
The CWS solution itself is, offering orchestration is built on Microsoft Azure, leveraging capabilities such as Azure App Services, Azure Active Directory and Azure Virtual Network, and is engineered for global availability, massive scalability, security and reliability. From the solution deployment can be done to public – and private clouds and datacenter infrastructures. For now the infrastructures supported are offered by Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Cisco InterCloud, CloudPlatform, SoftLayer, and public and private clouds based on Citrix XenServer and vSphere.
Citrix will be delivering a tech preview of Citrix Workspace Services in the second half of 2014, customers can sign up to be part of this tech preview here.