Citrix Synergy 2010
As I’m sitting in the auditorium waiting for Mark Templeton, President and CEO of Citrix, to kick off Citrix’s Synergy 2010 (#CitrixSynergy for you Twitter folks). It appears that the auditorium is going to be just packed with attendees. Mark is always an engaging, interesting speaker who fills his sessions with useful insight.
As with other events, loud, music is blaring as folks enter the auditorium. It’s my best guess that someone thinks that this music presents Citrix as a forward thinking, “with it” company. I’m relatively certain that the majority of attendees don’t have this type of music playing in their office while they are trying to work. This makes conversation just about impossible without shouting. So, of course, if the loud music and the loud attempts at conversation are combined, the noise level is really high.
Contemplating the past
This event certainly has grown from the first Citrix event (Thinergy) that I attended in the Swan and Dolphin hotel complex near DisneyWorld in Orlando years and years ago. At that time, Citrix offered an access virtualization product calle MetaFrame that allowed individuals to access applications running on Windows NT 3.51 Servers and if I’m not mistaken on Sun servers running Solaris.
Now Citrix or a partner supplies products for industry standard systems in nearly every layer of my model of virtualization. It also has a number of Software as a Service offerings as well. This makes it possible for organizations to deploy some very powerful solutions.
I also notice that Sinbad, the entertainer, is going to do a show as part of the event party that is scheduled at the end of the event. I wish I could stay to hear him again. He’s fun!
Mark Templeton’s Keynote Address Analysis
The following bullets describe his session. This list isn’t a complete summation of Mark’s comments.
- Mark presented this event as speaking for all of virtual computing. I suspect that some folks who aren’t here just might not agree with his assessment.
- Mark is trying to present his company’s products combined with Citrix’s partners as making up “Virtual Computing.” In reality, however, virtual computing includes many types of technology, running on mainframes and midrange systems, that are way outside of the area of focus of the Citrix ecosystem.
- He then went on to discuss the Citrix Innovation Award. Eleven finalists who use virtualization and cloud computing were put to a public vote. The winner of the 2010 Citrix Innovation award is Sonnenschein Nath and Rosenthal LLP. It seems that this law firm has used Citrix’s access and application virtualization combined with Citrix’s iPhone receiver to create an agile and yet secure environment. They’re also using XenApp and XenDesktop. I was fascinated that they presented their remote datacenter as an “in house cloud.” I think that this might be just a bit of “cloudwashing.”
- Mark then went on to speak about “the virtual workstyle” and the craziest place where they’ve worked. By the way, there was no mention of the challenges that this presents to keeping a good work/life balance. Here are some of the places people mentioned.
- In a coal mine
- In a tour boat
- In a van on the beach
- In a cafe in Tibet.
- In a rain forest
- An Australian beach (yes, there was a photo of a crocidile.)
- From the international space station
- He would pose that the virtual style means moving work to the most optimal place. In his words, doing whatever, whenever and wherever. He referenced virtual work teams, working from home when necessary and yet never touched on political and sociological challenges to that style of work. Many old time managers seem to believe that if they don’t see work being done, it isn’t being done.
- The next topic was the large screen (your PC), the medium screen (something like the iPad) and the small screen (something like a smartphone).He would say that the desktop is meant to empower people, the mid size device is for entertainment and the small screen is for alerts and dealing with work o the run.
- He would suggest that it boils down to “virtual meetings,” “virtual desktops” and “virtual servers.” Of course, Citrix has the products that are needed to make this view of the world reality. I’m not sure that everyone would agree that “virtual meetings” is the future for everyone.
- A group of Citrix partners presented their successes that can be attributed to Citrix’s technology
All in all, it was a good keynote address. I didn’t hear much that was really new. What was said demonstrated an evolution of Citrix’s messages and technology.
