Application delivery

Application delivery is rapidly becoming one of the hottest topics in IT circles today and in many ways, applications represent the closest intersection between IT and business according to Rob Willis, area vice president, ANZ at Citrix Systems.

The success of most IT organisations today depends on ensuring that these applications meet their business goals in a world where the variables are in a constant state of change.

Stop talking about application deployment
To change the way your IT organisation thinks about application delivery, you may first need to change the way they talk. Most IT organisations still talk about deploying applications. “Deployment” however, is a term locked in the distributed computing era that has very little relevance to today’s far more complex and dynamic world.

In many ways, deployment represents the very mentality that gets so many companies into trouble today.

The word “deploy” implies moving something large and complex from one location and physically entrenching it somewhere else. When you deploy something, it requires an enormous effort, takes a long time and almost always ends up costing more than expected. Once something is deployed, it’s hard to change, and most of the time you end up having to deploy more people to fix what didn’t work the first time. Deployment is unidirectional and generally implies a one-time event. Worse yet, when you operate with a deployment mindset, the process can be so rigid and slow, the experience of the people on the receiving end is often a distant afterthought. If this description fits many of your previous application rollouts all too well, you are not alone.

Delivery, by contrast, is a dynamic and fluid concept that far more accurately depicts the way successful companies think about getting applications to end-users today. Unlike deployment, delivery is flexible, bi-directional, responsive and efficient. Cable TV providers, for example, are in the business of delivering content to any user in any location, the moment it is requested. They don’t care what kind of home entertainment system the users have or how often it changes. They don’t care what kind of media format the content is stored in or which studio produced it. Their entire focus is on creating a flexible delivery network that allows anything that is requested to be delivered quickly, reliably and predictably to anybody who requests it.

Package delivery services such as FedEx and UPS illustrate this mentality as well. When you order something online and want it delivered, all you care about is that it gets to you quickly, reliably and securely. You expect the delivery service to figure out where the nearest shipping point is and to know the best combination of vans, trucks and airplanes necessary to meet that requirement. When the driver arrives at the door with your package, you also know that if you hand him a package of your own to deliver to anywhere else in the world, he will take it with a smile and ensure that it gets there with the same speed, security and predictable cost as the package you just received.

Delivery breaks the cycle of incrementalism
To succeed in today’s business climate, you must be able to support this same level of flexibility in your application delivery strategy. The root problem, of course, is that most of the IT systems our businesses run on today represent enormous investments that have become piled on top of each other over the years like an archeological dig of successive technology advances. The resulting systems are static, complex, costly and wholly unsuited to the realities of modern applications.

When you operate with an application deployment mindset, you end up with applications that are bound to these static systems. The moment any of the original assumptions change, the success of the application is compromised. This situation, of course, is the accumulated result of a great many architectural, technology, vendor and management decisions made incrementally over time — with completely rational thinking in every case, but with an accumulating set of unintended consequences that eventually stifles your ability to meet the changing requirements of applications and users. Hard-coding is symptomatic of incrementalism, and many organisations are waking up to the fact that hard-coding kills — it kills business flexibility and agility; it kills information sharing and security; it kills operating and capital budgets; but most importantly, hard-coding kills your ability to change.

When you move to an application delivery mindset, your entire approach changes. Instead of focusing on the unique deployment requirements of each new application at the time of rollout, your focus shifts to building a services-oriented application delivery infrastructure that assumes change by decoupling users, networks and applications, then dynamically re-coupling them on the fly in a way that can support an infinite number of application and user scenarios.

Delivery prepares you for entirely new application paradigms
As you shift your focus from application deployment to application delivery, you also prepare your company for the significant future paradigm shifts that are inevitable in today’s rapidly changing business and technology climate. As long as your IT leaders remain in a static application deployment mindset, they will continue to look at each new application as an entirely independent entity with its own unique set of systems, infrastructure and user requirements. The more each new application varies from the ones that came before, the more your infrastructure will need to change each time to suit the new “deployment.” By focusing instead on building a flexible delivery infrastructure that is application-fluent by design, this dynamic changes forever, allowing you to stay one step ahead of each new user and application requirement, including the ones you didn’t see coming.

This is not unlike what successsful companies in the physical delivery world have done to keep pace with their changing environments. Take FedEx, for example, which substantially broadened its document delivery network in 2004 with the acquisition of Kinko’s. This transaction represented an apparent departure from the company’s earlier physical transportation businesses. What they realised, however, is that the needs of their customers were changing, as was the technology through which documents and information would be delivered. While FedEx could not have predicted exactly how all of these changing variables would impact its business, FedEx knew that its strength was in providing a flexible, services-oriented delivery network that was always one step ahead of changing customer requirements.

This vision allowed FedEx to further differentiate itself from competitors by rolling out a whole new range of integrated services perfectly suited to today’s on-demand information age. As a result, a customer flying from San Francisco to London for an important business meeting now has a whole new range of options for getting documents to the meeting in time. In addition to printing and shipping them in advance, he can now simply upload them electronically to his document delivery provider before he leaves, knowing that they will be printed at a site in London and physically delivered to his hotel before he arrives.

By shifting your focus away from one-off application deployment projects to a model that focuses instead on building a flexible infrastructure for ongoing application delivery, you can likewise remain one step ahead of similar trends with applications and users. At Citrix Systems, we work with thousands of the world’s most successful companies every day, helping them implement a more flexible application delivery infrastructure that is designed from the outset to support the virtually infinite number of scenarios between each application’s point-of-origin and each user’s point-of-access — an infrastructure that incorporates the best delivery method for each unique application type, from virtualisation and streaming technologies for Windows-based applications to advanced optimisation techniques for web-based applications — an infrastructure that is future-proofed because it is designed upfront with change in mind, not pieced together over time to meet the incremental requirements of each new application and user scenario.

Most importantly, this approach to application delivery empowers you to be truly responsive to business change, delivering each new application with the best performance, security and cost, regardless of the application, user or location. In an increasingly volatile world where you face a dizzying array of changes to applications, users and business climates, making application delivery a strategic imperative is no longer an option. The good news is that making this shift now will enable your company to seize new opportunities and create an environment that is unparalleled in business productivity, efficiency and user experience.