Citrix DaaS (formerly Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops service) Reviews

We encountered some challenges in publishing outdated applications to end users, and we initially attributed it to ZenApp. However, we were eventually able to publish these applications to a specific user group that required access. It was a straightforward situation as we were primarily hosting end-of-life applications.

The architecture I built had a robust failover mechanism for the endpoints, and the interface was user-friendly. 

We were able to successfully publish the applications we needed without much difficulty. While understanding the background processes required some reading, I was able to deploy the system without any outside assistance or consulting.

My only issue with Citrix is that they frequently rebrand their products. I'm using the app and everything is fine but after a couple of years, it's entirely different. There were an enormous number of Citrix tools readily available. My immediate concern was selecting the correct ones.

I was able to choose the tools I required, and as previously said, the products I used have now been rebranded as Citrix Workspace.

It's similar to what VMware does with its Workspace One.

Before they transitioned to a workplace, I had assembled a Citrix environment using ZenApp and desktop and expanded upon it. Although it never reached production, I received training and successfully set it up.

In my opinion, it was very robust. I enjoyed working with it. We had used it for several years, and you could see that the software itself was being updated with time. Overall, I found it to be a pleasant experience.

We didn't face any scalability issues as we had a limited number of users, around 20 to 30, who needed access to the end-of-life applications.

The scalability was a nonissue. However, we didn't get into hundreds or thousands of users. I definitely don't have the experience to tell you that.

I didn't have to contact them as I could deploy it myself. I accessed their documentation through their website and my previous experience, which enabled me to do it independently without any assistance from them.

I remember that we had some challenges with sharing printers, especially with setting up access only for the finance and legal departments. It was a bit tricky, and I think that situation would have required assistance from technical support. However, we eventually managed to figure it out and get it to work, which was important for those departments.

If I recall correctly, setting up access to a printer was quite challenging. I don't have the specifics in front of me, and it's been some time since I worked on it, so I can't provide details. However, I do remember that it was more difficult than any other task I had to do.

I found it a bit complex, especially since we started using VMware products more frequently. If I had the choice, I would have simplified the process by using VMware Workspace going forward.

I don't quite remember the specifics of what we had. I believe we had a 25-user license, and I don't recall it being overly expensive. 

It was a reasonable cost. However, if you were to scale it up to hundreds of users, the cost would undoubtedly appear significant.

This is no different from what I would expect from VMware Workspace pricing.

I would rate it around seven or eight. It was highly robust and matured in terms of its features. I was building a high-availability environment while deploying it, and I appreciated its capabilities in that regard. Overall, it was quite robust and dependable.

I was quite satisfied with that as a solution.

Because I wasn't able to take the solution further, I would rate Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops a seven out of ten.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to thoroughly test it.

Despite not being able to conduct extensive testing, I found it to be good to work with, and it performed as advertised.

We are using Citrix for remote connectivity. We have multiple types that are deployed in different clients. Some are desktops as services, some as workspaces, et cetera.

Our company is procuring the license for it; the customer is using it.

It's for engineers to remotely connect to the console or desktop of the client or the customer side for debugging or resolving issues. That's where we use it primarily.

The remote desktop connectivity is where we have our focus. That's the main use case. 

The product is stable.

We've never had scalability issues.

We want to reduce costs. They should offer a different pricing model. 

Some manual work is required now with Citrix, like installing some client agents, et cetera, which could be automated. We'd really like to see more automation in the future. 

It is not easy to set up. 

It's part of our application, so we've been working with the product for more than a year or so.

So far, the solution has been quite stable. I would rate it eight out of ten. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

We haven't had any issues with scalability. That said, scaling also depends on how many users are trying to access it at a given time. As we move some of these applications to the cloud, we will face the scalability question. However, those issues will be addressed later. 

We currently have hundreds, or even thousands, of users on the solution right now.

Technical support is good. I would rate them eight out of ten. 

Positive

I've also worked with AWS Workspaces. I also have experience with Microsoft Remote Desktop Services.

I haven't previously worked with any other solution in this company.

The initial setup is not easy. For example, there are agents that need to be deployed and the agent deployment has some issues when the customer has certain patching or operating systems that are not compatible. 

While this solution is mostly on-prem, we are working to move more toward the cloud. We'll have to explore how we can leverage cloud capabilities in the future. 

I'm not sure how long the deployment takes precisely. 

There are a few ways customers may save costs by using this solution. 

It's basically to maintain the applications, especially medical devices. Typically, one way the product can save a company money is if a person would traditionally have to go to the site and find the problem. If there is no option for remote connectivity or desktop, then that can be expensive. That will add to the costs. 

A second issue is uptime. If you don't have the capability to jump on a machine and start troubleshooting right away, then it'll take more time to get the system up if something happens.

We'd like the solution to be less expensive and are looking for alternative options. The cost is on the higher side. We pay for the licensing on an annual basis.

The technical support costs depend on the contract. We have separate contracts that are different based on the customer. If the contract covers technical support, that is fine, however, if it's a basic contract, then we have to pay for the technical support.

I cannot speak to the exact amount the company pays at this time. 

We now want to see the other options in the market and make some comparisons. As we go forward with the next application, we will probably look at the whole picture and see the best product, especially from a feature and host perspective.

We need to see what's there in the market and which has less manual work. We want to see how we can reduce costs and also improve the overall CI/CD process of packaging something with the customer.

We're a partner. We are using Citrix both for ourselves and our customers. 

Citrix is one of the pioneers in this area and has been around for a long time. The technical support is good. From a usability standpoint, it's also good; however, there are some aspects, like hosting, and especially on-prem deployments, where some manual work is needed. It could be that we are not doing as per the latest guidelines or something, which we need to look at and see what we can improve. That said, overall, it's a good product for remote connectivity and remote desktop applications.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. 

Our company uses the solution to gather user abstractions from their machines, locations, devices, and work areas. Classic use cases include mergers, acquisitions, and work from home scenarios. 

We have a partnership, are resellers, and generally provide services to clients based on their use of the solution. 

The solution effectively brokers a virtual desktop connection. 

Because of the solution's ubiquity, it is easier to find answers to problems than with competitive products. If we have a problem, somebody has blogged it or answered it in a forum. Frequently asked questions and white papers are readily available. 

The sales team does not focus on client needs but instead focuses on selling higher-priced items. 

I have been using the solution for twenty years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is quite scalable. 

Support is no better or worse than other vendors. 

The setup is straightforward. 

We implement the solution for customers. 

I cannot comment on pricing because we have more than a million seats under management so we get the best price. 

Our pricing view is very different than most users. 

It is important to find an integrator who has experience. Do not try to implement the solution yourself. 

I rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

The solution is primarily used for provisioning the desktop for the employees in the company, including different layers of employees. We have different groups using the PVS, the provisioning tool. We are provisioning different groups according to the level, according to the department, et cetera, to deliver a specific desktop for employees who are working at home.

The PVS technology itself, the provisioning, is great. It's very easy. It's very simple to alter the main image or the golden image. 

It's also very secure. 

I find Citrix is a stronger option in many other aspects since it's one of the most mature in the market. It's ancient and it's always developing itself to add new things. 

The initial setup is easy.

Scaling is straightforward. 

We have had issues with certain aspects, which is why we are looking for alternatives. For example, the firewall solution from Citrix is a bit complicated. Integration is hard. It needs a higher understanding of the network. It's not plug-and-play. When I deal with it, I always need assistance from the network team if I need to alter anything. It should be simpler to deal with. 

When I was doing comparison research, the thing that I found really interesting in Horizon is that the firewall setup is easy. It's like a wizard menu, and it's well-documented, so it's not hard to alter anything in the firewall. Maybe the feature that I want to be added to Citrix is well-written documentation and a wizard just to let me know what is going on in the firewall, how to edit things, and how to easily deploy something on the firewall. Do I initiate a rule or decline a rule? They just need to make it easier for me to troubleshoot firewall issues.

We're a company working for a certain customer and the customer has been working with the VDI since it started, so for a very long.

I've been working with it for a year.

The stability is pretty good and there are no real issues. The one concern is the firewall. If there's any error, U2 a firewall error, we were not able to easily modify it or easily solve it due to tissues with integration. You really need higher network knowledge. In the end, security issues or any issues on the firewall will affect the stability in the end. 

We are always adding new PVS machines. As an operator, we're always asked to add new PVS machines to batch them, update them, add new machines, and add new images. It has been very easy to scale and everything is a click away. There are no issues while scaling.

The organization is huge, so I cannot say exactly how many people are using the solution. The organization has around 750 servers. On each server, there may be hundreds of machines. There are lots of users. There are maybe tens of thousands of end users actually using the desktop as a service through Citrix.

We don't really deal with technical support. All errors that we face, we are able to detect ourselves as an operator. We don't open any tickets with Citrix support itself. We don't have any experience with the support that Citrix provides.

Since the start we were working on Citrix.

It is straightforward to set up and implement. 

I participated in editing something in the image itself or while provisioning. That said, the main deployment happened long ago, and we are operators, so we were not really in the middle of the actual process of the deployment. 

The errors that we had during maintenance are typically all due to the firewall and its networking of it. Other than that, things are smooth, and all the errors are detectable. If it's an error in configuration and any other aspects except, of course, the networking of the firewall, it may be difficult. Otherwise, for other aspects, everything is easy to maintain.

I'm the operator for a customer, so I'm not really aware of the licenses. They do the deal with Citrix and we just operate the infrastructure or the VDI. I don't really know how much it costs in reality.

I was comparing this product against Horizon. I wanted to compare both solutions in case we need to migrate from one solution to another.

The company wants to migrate to the cloud so that's why we are searching for an alternative - to see if we should replace Citrix or keep on working on Citrix.

We are working with Citrix VDI, and we are mainly working on the PTS for provisioning.

I'm a system integrator. I'm dealing with the latest version of the product.

It's a very well-known solution, and it's very efficient. However, you need to dig deep into the architecture of it just to understand it and grasp it well, especially how things are calling one another, how things are operating inside the APIs and all the networking inside, and how things are working in the architecture to be able to work with Citrix and actually understand everything that's going on it. 

If you face any error, you'll be able to know the cause and easily go to the root cause. However, you must first understand the architecture, understand how things are calling one another, and how the networks play. Then, start step-by-step working on it, on the application itself. If you have good knowledge, you'll find working with it very easy.

I'd rate the solution a seven out of ten based on the fact that we did rin into a lot of issues related to the firewall. Other than that, Citrix works fine. 

We use Citrix for VDI and publishing applications. My company only has 50 users, but some of my customers have more than 10,000 users.

Remote access is useful.  

Citrix is a highly mature product, but they could always add more benefits by acquiring a third-party software product to integrate with their their solution and make it more complete.

I think they can improve the troubleshooting to make it easier for users to solve problems on their own. For example, it could provide an error code and some instructions on how to reconnect to the database or do something proactive to fix the issue with the system.

I have been using Citrix for more than 20 years.

Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is a backbone platform that organizations rely on. If Citrix is down, then the organization can't function, so it must be a stable solution. If we are working in a thousand-user organization and Citrix goes down, then 1000 employees are left idle.

If you can afford the licenses, you can scale Citrix up as much as you want. 

The initial setup is easy and only takes two or three hours. The most complex task is coordinating between the golden image and organizational resources. You need to install all the organization's applications and adjust the settings to meet the company's needs. Setting up a Citrix farm takes less than five hours, but tailoring it to the organization requires another three or four days.

The Citrix license model has changed. It costs around $240 per user for a single username, but a concurrent license costs double.

I rate Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops nine out of 10. This is the leading solution in the world for remote work. Citrix has had the top remote display for the last 20 years, and there is a huge technological gap between Citrix and its competitors. However, Citrix doesn't have the same level of marketing as its competitors. Many times, people don't realize that Citrix is the best until they've deployed it.

I recommend taking advantage of Citrix eLearning online courses. Four or five days of online training can help you overcome a lot of shortcomings, but you need two or three years of experience working with the Citrix system and infrastructure to be a system admin. 

We were looking for a way to deliver the desktop to the end-user securely and within a short time. We leverage their cloud-hosted desktop virtualization.

We use Azure Cloud and, in terms of laptops, we give them to our employees but, because of the COVID situation, sometimes they work from home using their personal laptops to connect to the office environment. They use Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops as a medium.

Before we used the solution, when an employee would join our company it would take us between seven and 14 days to completely configure and give them a laptop. Now, within a maximum of one day they get their computer and can start working on that system. It has simplified things for us.

The solution also simplifies our adherence to industry regulations for data protection and for compliance. For data protection, we have watermarking enabled and the solution opens in full-screen mode so that end-users cannot toggle between VDA and their desktops. The solution also disables use of the clipboard to copy data from the VDA desktop to an endpoint device. Moreover, there is an option to disable even taking a screenshot of the virtual desktop. All of these features help with data protection.

For compliance, we have our own URL to access our desktop server. We can also create a tenant-based method for deploying the virtual desktop for each project, and we can group them. Also, the communication between the endpoint and the virtual desktop is encrypted end-to-end. All communication is over SSL and TLS connections.

The most valuable feature is the watermark because most of the time our employees connect from a remote location. In case they photograph the DDA or some data, the watermark will show which user did so and from which IP they connected. That makes it more secure.

The solution also provides us with flexibility so that it can be used on any device. We mostly have Mac and Windows machines.

In addition, Citrix uses its ICA (Independent Computing Architecture) protocol and for end-users with less bandwidth, the Citrix connectivity enables them to work.

They need to adapt more quickly to the latest additions to the Microsoft operating system. If Windows 10 comes out with a new version, there are compatibility issues and it takes them a lot of time to release an update.

Also, even though they support Linux, as with Windows, we are not able to use the latest version. They need to bring more simplicity to the Linux Virtual Desktop.

I've been using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for one year.

We don't have that many users, but the scalability is good. If required, there is no limit on the number of users. Currently, we have about 5,000 users on virtual desktops and about 1,000 are using Citrix.

In terms of support they are lagging. They take a lot of time to respond. Once they connect, they take a lot of time to resolve things, especially when moving things from L1 to L2 and L2 to L3. Their backend people keep on changing and it can be annoying for us. It is not that easy to get support. The support is not that great, although it has improved when compared to a year ago.

Neutral

Once we put it on a Cloud Connector, and if we are using a test cloud, it is very easy to deploy. If you want to deploy the ADC, then it takes some time to consider things, but otherwise deployment of Citrix consists of simple steps.

Because we are deployed in the cloud, it took us some time to configure the ADC. The rest of the components were deployed in a week's time, but the ADC took a lot of time, because there were a lot of compatibility issues. We followed the documentation, but it took some time for us to settle the configuration. The ADC is used to connect Citrix to the end-user system so it is a critical component. Deploying the ADC on the cloud is a complex process.

From the time we entered into an agreement to use Virtual Apps and Desktops, it took about six weeks to eight weeks until we could use it. On our end, there were two or three IT people involved.

The Citrix integrator we used was moderately helpful. They tried to help but they didn't have much experience with a cloud deployment. They were able to do on-prem fast, but GCP took them a lot of time.

Our deployment is in its initial stage so we cannot say there have been cost savings, but in terms of security, it is good. It has also improved the efficiency of our IT department by approximately 20 percent.

The pricing is a little bit high, but it's good value for the product's stability and efficiency.

You need to choose the right licensing, whether it is the Advanced or Premium Edition.

We have used Azure Virtual Desktop and some other solutions as well, but compared to all of them, in terms of the performance, the screen refresh, and security, Citrix is number-one.

Citrix is an enterprise leader for virtual desktops. We cannot compare Citrix options, usability, and simplicity with Azure Virtual Desktop. With Azure Virtual Desktop, there is a lot of slowness and audio will not work. When it comes to an enterprise-grade or first-class option, you need to look at Citrix.

You need to think about ADC. If you are planning a deployment in the cloud, you need to be well aware of what will work and what will not work with ADC. Otherwise, it will be difficult.

I used it because we had to work from home during COVID, and that's about it. I'm not using it any longer because we're now back to work.

I work for the State of Illinois, and we were able to stay open and provide the services for the needs of the people of the State of Illinois during COVID, which included unemployment services and everything else like that.

Its user-friendliness is most valuable. It was easy to log in and navigate. Some of such solutions are not very user-friendly, but this one was.

In the beginning, it did not go so well because, depending on the type of internet service at home, some people didn't play very nice with it, but once we got over that initial internet incompatibility, it worked fine.

It is slow. When everybody is logged in, it does have a tendency to slow down. You can tell the connectivity slows down a little bit, but it's still a good product. 

When you're doing Webex, there are a few features that are disabled when you're working from home. Sharing screens is a bit hard. The screen is grainy. It doesn't look as clear if you were just sitting at your desktop.

I last worked with it in March.

It is a good, stable product, but if there is bad weather or if you live out in the country, it has a tendency to drop. Connectivity can be a little flaky.

It is very scalable because we started with 15,000, and by the time we finished using it, we had almost 30,000 people on it. We doubled.

We had directors using it. We had techs. All kinds of people who worked for the State of Illinois were using it to do their jobs. It was used all the way down from maintenance people to all the way up to even the governor. The governor was using it.

We still have some people who are working from home. So, some people are still using it.

I didn't take care of any of the tickets. If I had a problem, I called our help desk, and within two to three hours, the issue was fixed.

It was very user-friendly. It was one of the easiest software I've installed. To deploy it, it took us less than a week, and that was for over 15,000 users.

It was deployed in-house. We have an in-house Citrix group that basically takes care of all the updating, the patching of the server, and everything. When we purchased the product, they did come in and train some of our people. We were very pleased with that.

If you're a medium-scale or a small-scale business, it works great. As far as I know, our agency didn't have a whole lot of issues other than the people who live out in the country. We did have a few issues with those people, but once we got them set up through their own Wi-Fi and everything, it was great. It was just a simple tweaking, but it's a good, stable product. It really is.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. The reason I'm going to give it a nine and not a ten is that overall, it is a good, stable product, but people who live out and not in city limits could have issues setting it up at first. If there's bad weather with rain or wind, they may have some connectivity issues.

My primary use cases for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops are for:

• Anyone who wants to modernize their business continuity plan
• Anyone who wants to deal with data regulation compliance
• Anybody who wants to promote a work from home or remote-first strategy for their employees and team members.

In terms of the hardware and software that the service requires our company to make use of, we can typically decommission if our client has existing servers. We can decommission after moving the data off of them. 

My firm is hardware apathetic. I don't care if it runs Citrix Workspace. If our clients want low cost and high performance, we generally point people to the Ncomputing RX420(HDX) which is a Raspberry PI 4 device that mounts very neatly onto the back of the monitor and it can link into their network via wifi or ethernet connection.

It's a fantastic little device that is very manageable, cost-effective, and tends to last for quite a long time. Every time I've put them into place, the desktop environment is a little bit different than what people are used to. The mouse movements are not quite as good as a full house computer, but we're spending a couple of hundred dollars for something that's going to last five to 10 years, versus buying a desktop or even a lightweight desktop for $600 or $700 which is going to last three to five years. Most of my clients have been pretty excited about that trade-off.

There have been radical improvements in IT efficiency. Cost savings are on a case-by-case basis. Some of my clients were not going all-in on any kind of management solution, so their initial monthly cost was higher when they went to Citrix. In most cases, it's a push. They're spending about the same money in either direction. But in a lot of cases, when you start to factor in the cost of downtime, the cost of inefficiency, the cost of a data breach, everyone is realizing much lower costs of management and ongoing costs to their IT department.

It's difficult to approximate how much it has saved because on one hand, I have a client that has 45 or 50 users and they realized a much higher increase of efficiency. A task in the previous model took half an hour, and under the new model, it takes five minutes.

When you spread that over 50 employees, that's a much higher percentage of drop than if a client has 10 employees. It's difficult to approximate but averaged across all of our clients, there is around a 25-to-30% reduction in costs.

We leverage the following technologies: 

• Application virtualization capabilities
• On-premises, desktop virtualization
• Cloud-hosted desktop virtualization
• Citrix managed cloud-hosted desktops

The fact that we can work from any device from any location is the most valuable aspect of the solution for us. In the last year, people have been restricted in their movements and we haven't been allowed to just show up to work. The fact that my clients can leverage a remote-first workplace that allows them a greater ability to recruit from a larger geographic area is valuable for us. 

You don't have to be able to commute to a major Metro in order to work there, you can work from any location. If you want to take a few days with your family but you have some projects that you're working on, it's going to take some of your time, but not all of it. You can just go to your Airbnb or wherever your family is staying and work remotely, do your job, and spend the rest of the time with your family.

Team members are relieved that they can continue to work and put bread on the table. They are relieved in the dichotomy that says they can put their family's needs ahead of their workplace's needs or vice versa. Maybe a child has a medical appointment or a social engagement that they would like to be at. You can fit those around your work schedule, work it out with your children and with wherever it is that they're going. In that way, both the employer and the employee realize a lower cost of operations. They realize increased flexibility and agility in their life. That dichotomy is either minimized or removed entirely. That's been very, very groundbreaking for them.

The deployment and management of hybrid Cloud Apps and Desktops is not 100% seamless, although it is very good. When you start mixing a third-party or a cloud-hosted app, it is generally pretty seamless. You don't notice a difference between a web-based app that you run on a physical machine, on a virtual machine, or through a Workspace. I have not seen any problems with that. A legacy application or a computer-aided design program has very specific requirements that can be a challenge. But with a little bit of research, once you settle on the solution, it's pretty good.

Security is a shining point of the Citrix Workspace. Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is a very robust solution when security is a concern. Furthermore, the content collaboration data-hosting that Citrix integrates with Virtual Apps and Desktops is among the best there is.

It is the same for the security of clients' intellectual property and data when remote employees use the solution. Content collaboration allows you to share data securely and is supported with two-factor authentication. You can have a consolidated data set with a widely distributed workforce and they can all be on the same sheet of music, all accessing the same data. Version control, access control lists, anything you could wish for, is available in their solution stack.

Citrix simplifies the adherence to industry regulations for data protection and for compliance. HIPAA, for example, if you share that data over two or three different clinics or facilities, you have to create and maintain some sort of SD-WAN or VPN in order to make sure that those applications and those datasets are shared only between those locations. With Virtual Apps and Desktops, that either reduces or removes the need for either the VPN or an SD-WAN, because they aren't actually sharing between various locations. You are accessing that data set through various locations. The benefit to that is that you have reduced complexity at the infrastructure level so there's less to troubleshoot. There's less to go wrong.

Templating the deployment process could use improvement. When you start, there are a large number of details that are quite client-specific, although they do share common themes. To get somebody up and running in a day is very difficult to do. They should streamline by use case.

There's always going to be an outlier that doesn't really fit neatly into any one use case, so that's going to have to be more customized. An accountancy firm has sensitive data. They are prime targets for identity thieves that are always looking for an easy target and low-hanging fruit. If they were to template a deployment for an accountancy firm with all the needful things that every accountancy firm is going to have to have, it should be that you can just radio button the Apps so that accountants can tell the backend that they're going to need certain things. Then you can say, "We have this number of users and they need this number of spare desktops - go." And it just built the Azure environment. That would be really great. I don't know that it's actually possible, but it would be really good. 

The other issue is the stocking orders and the monthly reports. They're difficult because we don't do it every day. We do the stocking order once a year and there's always confusion on the backend.

I've been using Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops for Azure for a little more than a year now. 

I would rate their support highly. They're very good and very responsive. We had an incident last year that dragged on and on but that was in the thick of having half the workforce that they were used to having and a radically increased call for service because of the pandemic. That's not really a true representation of what they could do. 

Most of the time, if there's an issue, I can fire it off to one of my account managers or through the Citrix portal and get a response back within, depending on the severity of the incident, a few minutes or up to the next business day. Depending on the severity of the problem, the next business day might be just fine. If it's just a little slow and it's irritating, but it's not causing anybody to not be able to work, the next business day is fine. If we're down and we need help right now, having 24-hour support would be excellent but that's kind of impossible.

I've had a client on board with me that was moving from another Citrix provider. They were working on hosting their own Citrix environment and they needed something that wasn't going to fall apart on them. Their customer service really flagged over the last year or so. They moved from a Citrix provider to me.

The deployment strategy widely varies between clients because, on one hand, I have an accountancy firm as well as another very similar solution for a defined benefits management firm. They have very similar needs but their business model is such that even though they've got the same needs, the way I have to meet those needs for each different client throws a monkey wrench into it. 

On the other hand, I have construction companies and engineering firms that could not be more different and customizing the solution for each of them and their needs is challenging. I can get the bones of the infrastructure up in two or three days. Then it takes another two or three days, at minimum, as much as maybe a week or two, to get everything dialed in just the way they like it before we start going into production.

The shortest amount of time I've seen it take to complete implementation is a week but it has taken a lot longer. 

I have seen ROI. It's opened me up as an outsourced IT department to seek and win much more lucrative contracts. Citrix has allowed me to pursue larger clients. Because when you are all on the same sheet of music with how this solution works, how it's supported, where you can deploy, and how onsite support really becomes almost a non-issue, you can seek clientele from every location, not just where you can drive to. It's allowed me to scale quite a lot.

My pricing advice would be to watch your Azure costs. If you're not used to it, like I wasn't last year, they can get very high very quickly and you can go upside down on your agreement very easily.

There is a steep learning curve. In the Cloud-hosted Virtual Apps and Desktops model, as a general rule, there's a high learning curve. If you're going from only providing local assets to your clients, a local server, local workstations, and you're going straight into Virtual Apps and Desktops for the Cloud in Azure, really do your homework. Really learn the tool, really understand how it's supported because you'll save yourself a lot of trouble down the line if you do. If you've got the resources available, throw one person at cost analysis for Azure. So that at least one person in your organization really understands how much something is going to cost to deploy and keep running so that you can size your agreements correctly.

If I could, I would rate Virtual Apps and Desktops an 11 out of 10. I will rate it a ten out of ten.