In my time as a consultant, I used to give my fair share of “it depends” answers. We’ve all probably done it. Sometimes the answer isn’t binary and all you can really do is lay out the pros and cons so your customer can make an informed decision. At least that’s what I thought at the time.

I came to learn that my most savvy customers would all ask the same question: “OK, I’ve got it. So what do other customers like me do?” We get this question about all kinds of things — disaster recovery plans, server published desktops vs. VDI, the number of users to expect per host, and much more. Lately the one I’ve been hearing a lot is, “I’ve got hybrid rights. How can I make better use of them?”

Hybrid rights are intended to give customers the opportunity to transition from what they are doing today — often an on-prem deployment of some kind — to a cloud service over a period of time and in the order that makes most sense for them.

For example, let’s say I’m a long-time XenApp and XenDesktop customer running an LTSR site on-prem today for one of my critical line of business apps. I know I’m going to have to upgrade that app and the underlying OS sometime next year, so I’d really rather not touch it twice if I can help it. In the meantime, we just acquired another company and my boss told me I have a month to have those users onboarded into our Citrix environment and have it fully ready to support Teams. This might be a perfect use case for me to leave the LTSR environment just how it is for the time being and save myself some work setting up that new use case by leveraging Citrix Cloud for the infrastructure. It also sets me up for the future if I’m ready to consolidate them when the upgrade to my LTSR environment comes around. And it still gives me the flexibility to run both the CR and LTSR VDAs if I need to. By the way, if you are curious on the CR/LTSR debate, there are some good reads here and here.

Citrix TIPs Webinar: Hybrid Rights

During our Technology in Practice webinar on August 15, we’ll dive into the question I started with and discuss what other customers are doing with their hybrid rights to get the most value out of them. We’ll talk about options if you are only entitled to VADS along with what else you can do for customers that have the full Workspace Premium array of products to work with. We’ll have two sessions, and you can register now.

I know there are also some of you reading this saying two things:

  1. Your example is bogus. I never get a full month notice.
  2. I hear you, but I tried this last year and hit blockers I just couldn’t work through.

For those of you thinking #1, I feel your pain. For those of you thinking #2, there are also some great enhancements we are going to talk about like customer-hosted Gateway as an IdP for Workspace that have helped a number of our customers work past some of the things that had them stuck this time last year. If that all sounds like your cup of tea or you just need something to listen to while you drink your coffee, sign up today!

Putting Hybrid Rights to Work for You
Date: Thursday, August 15

Time: 9 a.m. ET and 2 p.m. EDT
Register now

— Ryan McClure, Lead Architect, WW Customer Success Management and Rob Zylowski, Senior Architect, Citrix Consulting