Citrix acquired a company named ScaleXtreme, a cloud based automation/monitoring and management solution for cloud and datacenter. A team was form to repurpose their technology and define a new user experience to focus on automation, management and monitoring of Citrix solutions.
My Role
Principal Designer working closely with PM and Engineering teams from defining initial concepts and use of the technology, define visuals and interactions for initial releases to lead a small team of designers, writer, researcher and front UI Dev. to help grow the solution to an array of micro services that help simplify Citrix environment monitoring and management.
ScaleXtreme Acquisition
The design team got involved since the moment Citrix acquired this technology. Their UI was cumbersome, outdated and confusing, since they had a wide set of capabilities and supported multiple technologies. See some examples of their UI at the moment of the acquisition.
Design | Citrix Cloud Smart Tools Service
After a few iterations and multiple research studies, Smart Tools was created as a set of cloud-based tools that helped accelerate and simplify the design, deployment, and management of Citrix solutions, mainly XenApp and XenDesktop deployments, across any on-premises or cloud environments.
Design | Smart Build
smart Build enabled automation of Citrix deployments on-premise (Datacenter) or in the cloud using blueprints, Citrix pre-built, 3rd party or customers’. It also provided a wide range of capabilities to effectively manage these deployments.
Design | Smart Check
Provides health monitoring for Citrix XenApp & XenDesktop environment. Service provides recommended fixes, upgrades and issues for issues found in Citrix environment through a health check report.
Design | Smart Scale
Enabled automated and scheduled MV power management in cloud environments to help ensure that machines are only running when they are needed to avoid high charges.
Outcome
– Smart Build helped Citrix and partners’ sales engineers accelerate Proof of Concept deployments for current and future clients. Deployment time was reduced to hours in cloud environments, instead of weeks, that was what it usually took.
– Smart Check replaced an outdated Citrix solution (Citrix Insight Service), enabling automation to the health check process. Service was used on hundreds of customer’s sites on 2017.
– Smart Tools simplified the adoption of Cloud services for Citrix environments, at the time, cloud adoption was slow, instead of the preferred on-premise data center environments.