think-smarter.com Blog

Google to collide with Citrix?

There is a battle brewing out there: google versus citrix. Sounds absurd, its not. Google wants to become the place where people store thier data, run applications from and do all their computing. That is exactly what citrix does for the enterprise today.

A number of engineering people I have talked to have mentioned that Google’s  strength is the distributed application environment they have built which allows people to develop scalable new applications very quickly. The question is whether newer technologies erode the advantages that google has and almost make them like yesterday’s technology when it comes to applications over the web.

The generally held consensus is that Citrix’s current architecture would never scale to something serving millions of people around the world. But that is of their current architecture. The advantage that citrix like approach is that you can take existing applications and just plop them in and they work.

The first question is whether being able to deploy current applications for use over the web be a strong differentiator. I think it will be. The next question is whether it can give Yahoo, Google or Microsoft (or Akamai) a lead over the other. I again think the answer is yes. Microsoft’s live initiative is heading in that direction although it will run into resistance from the cash-cow products of the company.The other angle this competition could come from is from the people who are putting a box in your living room …

That brings us to the question whether a virtualization based approach will get us there. I recently came across a company called Atlantis Computing which  has the technology working. They signed up for the Amazon’s grid and have signed up over 5000 users all over the world for their beta. So while Citrix may not get there … the approach will definitely and it will turn the advantages of today dis-advantages of tomorrow for companies like Google.

3 comments January 17th, 2007

In search of the ITIL Philosophy?

Is there a simple ITIL philosophy that can be used as the guiding light for implementing ITIL. The general consensus about six-sigma was that if the top leaders in the organization understood that six-sigma was about “removing variability from a repeatable process“, and then they empowered their people to go achieve this the implementations were enormously successful. This was because the statement was actionable for people, it tied very closely to some metric they were evaluated on and it made intuitive sense. In organizations where they created a group (inside or consultants) to come up with the six-sigma plan, almost always resulted in failure.

Now as IT organizations look at ITIL, how could we describe it in a simple phrase like “removing variability from repeatable processes? What is the equivalent statement describing the ITIL philosophy?

When I searched on the web, here are some interesting possibilities:

- separate administrative tasks and technical tasks

- develop a common-lingo for communication about process and solutions
- automate repeatable process

- get budget from the CFO, wait for the next wave

- provide a service (like a resturant), not technology (cooked food).

What do you think?

1 comment January 17th, 2007