Eric Spiegel’s got the cure for Citrix reporting blues

I met with Eric today to talk about his company and what it does for its customers and came away thinking “why didn’t I think of that?” Eric Spiegel is CEO and co-founder of eXpert Technology Solutions, which provides turnkey, business-intelligence enterprise management software for Citrix and other platforms. He’s also a writer for Datamation Magazine and his columns are a great source of information for IT professionals looking for guidance on issues orthogonal to their professions.

As we know, Citrix is a thin-client application enabler: it can take a “fat client” windows application and through a small client application (or just a browser) on a client PC it can run an entire application from just a server and use the display/keyboard/mouse from the client. Eric and his two other co-founders set out to plug an important hole in Citrix’s product line: detailed analysis and reporting of who used what application, for how long, and whether they were supposed to be able to or not. While Citrix eases the administration burden of having to install applications on multiple computers, it doesn’t ease the administrators burden of reporting to upper management.

Eric and his team have created the XTS Access Tracking Manager which, among other things, does the following:

• Ensures that users are compliant with application security and usage rules. Sabanes Oxley, HIPAA, and other compliance needs become much easier to manage.
• See if you have too many or two few licenses of a product. If you have too many licenses, the XTS tool can help reduce maintenance costs. If you have too few licenses it can make sure you’re legitimate.
• Make sure you have surge capacity for disaster recovery, COOP, and other requirements. If you know what your usage looks like today you can do better capacity planning.

If you’re a Citrix shop (and who isn’t these days), check out the reporting tool. You’ll be glad you did.