Looking for information about how the other organizations are handling Citrix migrations? Interested in what the bottleneck is market-wide for peers? Look no further, a survey held by DABCC and eG Innovations shows the information you are looking for. Several Citrix products are end-of-life or coming to close it. It is interesting to see if organizations are working to replace current versions. The whitepaper is downloadable after registration but I saw some interesting graphs in the document I want to go into a bit deeper.
Citrix Migration trends
Survey asked several questions to respondents about their migration plans and their current environment. The answers given are combined in the graphs, which give the following results.
Current environment
One of the questions was about what respondents are currently running, This is the environment that is not migrated yet. Interesting to see that there is a number of people answering versions that are very old. If you imagine the end-of-life dates of the versions listed;
- Citrix XenApp 4.x aka Presentation server 4.x- EOL: March 2013
- Citrix XenApp 5.x (2008 version) – EOL: January 2015
- Citrix XenApp 6.x – EOL: June 2018
If we look at the date some companies are a long time overdue to upgrade. Reasons for this are often application compatibility and fear for the new. I personally think that application compatibility is the most commonly heard reason. Application vendors often are slow to adapt to changes in the IT market leaving the customer to work with outdated products. So although we see a 66% response in the usage of XenApp 7.x also 6.x is used a lot. Given that June is rapidly coming closer, this would lead to a huge amount of the 795 respondents being unsupported.
Citrix XenApp or XenDesktop
If we look at Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop we notice that the trend continues. A lot of respondents are using XenDesktop 7.x but still, a fair amount is using XenDesktop versions that are not supported anymore. The survey was held also in 2016 and the increase of 53% is not a big surprise.
Also when looking at Citrix XenApp we see the same pattern, An increase of 55% from 2016 in the adoption of Citrix XenApp 7.x. Still a lot of usage of older versions which is rather worrying.
Given the fact that in June 2018 All version lower than 7.x are end-of-life there is a lot of work to do for companies. The reason why I think this is worrying is that the 4,5 and 6 versions of Citrix worked with the IMA architecture which was not the most reliable offering. When 7.x came out FMA was introduced and it is 100% more stable. This alone should be enough reason to upgrade. In virtual environments, the deployment of a 7.x version is so much easier than all the requirements in a 6.x environment.
Hypervisor choice
One of the most interesting results from the 795 respondent survey is the usage of hypervisors. since many years most Citrix environments are running on virtualized environments. Virtual environments used to be the domain of VMware, years ago Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V were challenging this hegemony. New cloud solutions like Azure and AWS also were knocking on VMware’s door.
In 2018 survey we notice a dramatic change in percentage for Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V. They challenged VMware for years and two years ago XenServer had 40% and Hyper-V had 28% of the market (respondent answer). In 2018, even though VMware still stays at 74%, both other offerings are losing ground rapidly. The Cloud offerings, a marketing love child, are not really a threat still to the classic hypervisor. Of course, marketing would like us to think different, 1% is really a small percentage.
Cloud adoption
So when we see the percentage of Cloud adoption you might wonder why that is. A wobbling 50% of the respondents answered that have no plans to use Citrix Cloud services. This is bad news for Citrix, that’s a massive number. Of course, 31% answers that they might take a look at it in the future. Only 14% is seriously considering Citrix Cloud. It’s a pity we don’t know how many of the 50% is not acquainted with the Cloud offering and how many feel it is more expensive.
On the other side, large companies are more interested in looking at the Citrix Cloud offering. From a marketing perspective, this is not the best news, of course, it is wonderful that 60% is considering but considering is long-term talk.
Geographical diversity
Of course, I thought that perhaps this is because the respondents did come from one specific region, one that happens to love VMware. If we look at the respondents we see that the geographical diversity is spread evenly. 40% of the respondents are from Europe, 41% is from the Americas and 19% is from Asia. That is a good coverage of the world I for a survey and 795 people answering is a good number.
Citrix Monitoring tools
The survey, of course, it is cooperated by eG Innovations, about monitoring. So if we look at the monitoring answers we see the following answers in the graphs. 67% are using Citrix Director as their main Citrix monitoring solution. Citrix Director, although a nice tool, is very limited in monitoring. It can only be used for operational monitoring and won’t do anything for real Enterprise pro-active monitoring. More worrying is the usage still of Citrix Edgesight, the enfant terrible of Citrix. A cool tool but hard to operate.
The decline of usage of Citrix Management packs for SCOM is interesting, I would like to see a reason for that. Perhaps this is because other tools are being used. The survey doesn’t answer this.
Reasons to upgrade/migrate
The last thing I would like to show you before I give you the link to the document is the reasons behind a migration or upgrade. Not surprising is the fact that end-of-life is one of the main reasons for migrations. Also, the support for Windows 10 is a driver you would expect.
There are more interesting graphs in the document with a lot more clarification on it. It’s an interesting document that gives a good view of the current Citrix market. It seems there is some work to do with the Cloud offering (VMware and Microsoft have, I think, the same issue). The usage of an older version of all the Citrix products is something that I think is worrying, how can one offer good user experience with these versions. Read the document, which is found right here for more answers – www.eginnovations.com/Citrix-Migration-Trends
The post State of the Citrix market 2018 (migration trends) – A DABCC and eG Innovations survey appeared first on .