Spotfire Statistica® on Hosted Desktop

The Spotfire Statistica® client applications (also known as Statistica workstation) can be installed via a hosted desktop solution like Citrix XenApp or Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS).  Customers also use Azure cloud or an AMI for virtual desktop.

Statistica has customers using both hosted desktop solutions. Typically Statistica customers will consider RDS vs Citrix when they have 400 users or less. The more users, the more likely that Citrix is needed to manage a complex situation. 

When evaluating which hosted desktop solution to use, here are the key topics to evaluate for Statistica.

• availability of Citrix administrators vs RDS adminstrators
• complex network firewall requirements - Citrix can help with UCD / UCP requirements
• graph updating and rendering - Citrix can help with "pixel perfect" graphical requirements
• network relability - Citrix has more options for dealing with an unreliable network
• performance monitoring - Citrix has complex performance monitoring and tuning tools
• printing - Citrix supports complex printing options

Note: While the bullets above highlight what Citrix can do, this should not be taken as a recommendation. It just depends on the user's requirements for their use case. For example, Statistica's users may not notice the difference between RDS and Citrix's graphic rendering. Or users rarely print or just need simple printing options which RDS provides.

Additional "food for thought": 

• Citrix does not allow for third party client interfaces. RDS does allow this and the number of client tools is growing. 
• Citrix has more granularity on policies then RDS. 
• Citrix is a complex tool. If you don't have regular access to trained / experienced resources then the value of Citrix is diminished. The same can be said about RDS. 
• External access (user access) to RDS or Citrix can be unfriendly (pop ups, requests for login and password). Both tools can be configured to use SSO and avoid this issue.
• RDS has no granularity for adminstrators. You are an adminstrator or you are not an adminstrator.
• RDS is a foundation used by Citrix XenApp.  Therefore a RDS Client Access License (CAL) is needed for both hosting solutions.

Videos

Topic complete at 20:51 - the video after 20:51 discussed a discontinued product named Azure RemoteApp

Topic complete at 17:25

Additional Information

• Comparative Feature Analysis by Citrix (2016)
• So why choose Citrix over Microsoft RDS? (2016)