Citrix Synergy 2018 in the Rear View Mirror…

Last week Citrix Synergy 2018 happened in Anaheim, California. This was the 21^st Citrix Synergy by my calculation. I was at the first Citrix “Thinergy” in 1998 at the Swan Hotel in Orlando. The conference remains one of the most Windows desktop focused conferences in the industry.

The ultimate feedback we received from our customers and the community is that there is now, more than ever, a market need for Workspace Environment Management across all Windows desktops, not just Citrix. If you manage your users centrally you can keep all of your desktops dynamic and add more Citrix, VMware, Amazon, or Microsoft RDS/RDMI desktops at anytime with zero user downtime. Our ProfileUnity user environment management, Stratusphere monitoring and diagnostics, and FlexApp layering is solving this central user management dilemma daily for customers.

Monday was day one for me. I attended Citrix Product Management briefings as a Citrix Ready partner. In short, Citrix Cloud is a big focus now and they are introducing new features and products for this initiative. Liquidware has been verified as Citrix Ready since 2009 and we appreciate the NDA updates we get on product direction and focus. I also attended the CUGC (Citrix User Group Community) social event which attracted quite a crowd! Liquidware has been a proud sponsor of CUGC since this organization  launched and we’re glad to see it flourish.  I got to spend a few moments with Ron Oglesby too, he now serves as point from Citrix for the group – among his other responsibilities – he’s a busy guy at Citrix. I rounded out the day by attending IGEL’s Community event that was spearheaded by Doug Brown.

The Keynote on Tuesday seemed to be well received and was also focused on Citrix Cloud. It was the first day of Solutions Expo and it opened with a roar. We publicly demonstrated our latest versions of ProfileUnity with FlexApp and Stratusphere UX. We had announced that we’d be demonstrating our new cloud profiles option which are saved directly to Object-based storage on Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.  We also demonstrated Stratusphere’s new Process Optimization features for the first time. The Liquidware Booth was slammed with interest as soon as the doors opened because of this but we also had a prime location – front and center in the expo hall.

Our object-based storage of profiles is already very much in demand because it solves real challenges for a highly available and portable profile that’s seamlessly cloud based. With zero need for SMB file shares, SQL clusters, or IIS servers, it’s very innovative and it is available now. We’ve already had at least one other vendor announce that they plan to do something similar – eventually . We support all three popular clouds today. They say imitation is the best form of flattery so we’ll take that as a compliment!

VMblog stopped by and interviewed us to see what’s new. Check out this video that was recorded live. 

On Tuesday we also hosted one of the industry’s most prestigious groups, The Inside Track for EUC VIPs. This group consists of over 100 influencers, bloggers, and media. Several dozen members were at Synergy and we held a luncheon with them at a nearby steakhouse. It was a great time and we got to brief the members of updates from the sponsors first-hand. Other sponsors of the group include NVIDIA and IGEL.

Wednesday and Thursday were filled with non-stop customer and partner meetings for me as well as booth time. We had several current customers come by and rave about our products and a few that you’ll be seeing case studies on shortly.

The M7 Partners party was a blast and were proud to be a major sponsor now for the third year. The event was held at the House of Blues where Thunderstruck was in private concert (tribute to AC/DC). Most M7 Partners are also partners of Liquidware and have been trained how to implement our Workspace Environment Management suite known as Liquidware Essentials.  Members of M7 Global Partners are AEC Group, Convergence Technology Consulting, Entisys360, Gotham Technology Group, Hogan Consulting Group, Intra Systems, IPM.

If you’d like to check out the products we demo’ed at Synergy they are available and ready for you to test. Just visit our download page! Now the preparation for VMworld begins!