In this series, we’ll focus on the implications of specific technology solutions for CFOs. Though they are the keepers of a company’s financial health, they don’t always understand the advantages that come with certain technology solutions, and IT professionals sometimes take a suboptimal approach when explaining these concepts to the finance team. This series is intended to help make those conversations easier and more effective.

Your CFO is focused on keeping costs under control, and a request for new technology tends to be met with skepticism. Whether he thinks you’re chasing something new and exciting or believes that the status quo is just fine for now, the CFO isn’t likely to start writing checks just because you asked. Emphasizing the technological advantages of a particular solution won’t help much either, especially for virtualization technologies, which can be difficult for anyone working outside the infrastructure team to grasp fully. So, when you reach out to your CFO to talk about the need for a virtualization solution (e.g., storage, server or desktop), you need to make sure your pitch is tailored to a decidedly non-technical audience.

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Citrix has released a preview of its Receiver for BlackBerry. You can download it using your device or demo it from the Citrix Cloud. This is an exciting new development and moves desktop virtualization further into the mobile device space. Since BlackBerry is the device of choice for the business community, the Citrix Receiver application is now available to a much larger constituency. Receiver is also available for smartphones from Apple, Android and Windows.

You can learn more over on the Citrix blog.

[Source: Citrix]

In the battle between IT departments and malware developers, victory for the “good guys” seems like a remote possibility. They are always a step ahead, and desktop support teams and security professionals are often forced to react to grave threats. Viruses don’t require much technical savvy to create, but protecting your enterprise from them does. It isn’t a fair fight. Further, the stakes are high. Your entire company is at risk – not to mention your customers and partners. Fortunately, you have a new tool in your arsenal of protective measures: Citrix XenDesktop 4.

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There’s a new Xen® hypervisor in town! The latest from Xen.org is that Xen 4.0, the most advanced open-source hypervisor, is now available. It reflects the efforts of more than 50 technology companies, universities and experts on virtualization. Xen 4.0 leverages the best network cards available, adds better memory and security to drive virtualization infrastructure and makes virtualization suitable for all workloads.

With Xen 4.0, you can deploy virtualization “across every server in a datacenter, bringing ease of management, secure architecture, high availability, agility and efficiency to all applications. ”

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Whether you realize it or not, you’re betting your entire company on your disaster recovery and business continuity solution. If you are unable to recover quickly in the wake of a catastrophe, you could incur additional unexpected costs, lose planned and potential revenue and even fail to get the business back up and running.

Storage and server virtualization solutions can help you make your existing D/R plan more effective. Here are four ways you can use storage and server virtualization to improve your disaster recovery and business continuity environment:

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Now is the time to upgrade! Whether you move to Citrix XenApp 6 or “trade up” to XenDesktop 4, the opportunities are substantial. It can be tough to give up what you know, but the pricing available on XenApp 6 and XenDesktop 4 is favorable, and the new features offered will accelerate your path to ROI.

For XenApp 6, here are seven reasons to make the move now:

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Did you know that Citrix just played a role in sending the first tweet from space? The action on the International Space Station shows just what the convergence of desktop virtualization, social media and an immovable drive to push further the boundaries of human experience can accomplish.

NASA has incorporated Citrix XenDesktop 4 with high-definition HDX technology into its recently launched Crew Support LAN. This system gives astronauts on the International Space Station direct, private access to a desktop that looks familiar – bringing all the comforts of home, at least technologically, to even the most remote of locations. In addition to virtual desktops, the Crew Support LAN features Citrix Branch Repeater WAN optimization technology.

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Bill Burley, VP and General Manager of the XenApp Product Group, discusses the newly released XenApp 6 virtualization solution. Watch the video to learn more, and click here to read more about Citrix XenApp6 from MTM Technologies.

Your datacenter is full of waste. You have unused storage, unused processor power and unused bandwidth. Yet, platform constraints force you to continue to make costly equipment investments. While diligent capacity planning and management can help take the sting out of future purchases, you still may be overspending. Rather than buy systems when much of your infrastructure is idle, it may be time to virtualize.

Server, storage and desktop virtualization can unlock more of your IT infrastructure’s capacity, delivering a rapid cost savings and ROI boost based on investments you have made already. Using virtualization, you can knock down the walls that block platforms: computing power becomes computing power, regardless of the system that provides it. This delivers unparalleled flexibility.

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A new collaboration agreement between Citrix and Microsoft has led to Citrix support for the upcoming Microsoft RemoteFX platform. This newly announced platform will be made available in a future release of Windows Server 2008 R2 service pack 1. It will allow all virtual desktops on a single Windows Server or Hyper-V server to share the power of graphics acceleration hardware built into server and end user devices.

Under the new collaboration agreement, Citrix XenDesktop™ will expand its high-definition HDX™ technology to further enhance the capabilities of RemoteFX and extend them to a broader range of use cases and locations. By addressing the most demanding rich graphics environments, Citrix and Microsoft will continue working together to advance the state-of-the-art in desktop virtualization technology, making virtual desktops a rich, high-definition experience for all users, regardless of their device, location or role.

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