Application delivery

I’m currently doing lots of work on application delivery, reviewing the whole space and trying to map all of the different solutions to their associated business use cases and come up with decision support materials to guide customers through the maze and prioritise our investments.

What does the maze look like?  Well I’m not able to talk in detail about that right now, but Brian Madden sums up the situation well:

Ten years ago it was easy. We only had two options: Citrix (the new way), and traditional installs (the old way). But in 2007 we have application streaming, virtualization, and isolation; VDI- and Terminal Server-based server-based computing; local installations, local streaming, remote desktops, remote isolation, OS streaming, OS isolation…. the list goes on.

The one question I’m asked again and again is, “With all of these different methods of deploying apps, how do we figure out what we should use in our environment?” (The second most frequent question I get is, “what’s real and what’s not today?”

We too are trying to answer these questions, not just on a per application basis, which is the focus on Brian’s article, but for a customers entire application portfolio often numbering several thousand applications.  We’re also trying to ensure that our focus is not just on a point in time, ie we are trying to lay out a roadmap for change, that reflects the business, web 2.0, enterprise 2.0 and consumerization trends as well as the improvements in legacy application delivery technology.

We’re doing the work in the wiki that I posted about yesterday.