(TLDR) Summary: This week at Citrix Synergy was awesome, and there’s lots of fun stuff happening. But what I’m most excited about is our customers, the tech industry, and how quickly everything is changing! There’s never been a better time than now to dive into the organizational transformation journey, grab a partner and vendor, and just go for it. I’m thrilled to see how we can help our clients become incredibly successful on the way! This stuff isn’t easy, but I think that’s what makes it so fun, challenging, and rewarding for all of us. This is what gets me out of bed every morning! Now for the highlights…

This week I was down in Anaheim for our Citrix Technology Professionals (CTP) meetings and Synergy 2018. The trip was awesome. Incredibly valuable, and a great time to reconnect with friends. Monday started with our annual CTP meeting, where we were joined by Citrix Technology Advocates (CTA) members for the first time. The CTA/CTP meeting on Monday included briefings David Henshall (CEO), Jeroen van Rotterdam (SVP of Engineering), and PJ Hough (Chief Product Officer), followed by 4 hours of the UnConference style discussions with product managers and Citrites. But for me, the highlight from day one was captured in my LinkedIn post…

I can’t thank them enough for all the hard work Perrine Crampton and now Ron Oglesby have put into making the CTP program so great. It truly is an honor and marker in my career to be part of something great.

Tuesday kicked off with the Opening Keynote from David Henshall and a number of the Citrix leaders, which you can watch online here.

There were many key announcements during the keynote, which you can hear and see many demos if you watch the recording. I created a summary slide of the top topics from Day 1 across Experience, Choice and Security categories from David Henshall, PJ Hough, Steve Wilson, and Calvin Hsu. If you didn’t hear it during the keynote, you’ll be excited to know that all key features and product announcements will be delivered and generally available within the next 90 days! This is great, really happy to hear Citrix say this from the stage.

The top product/feature that stole the show was Citrix Workspace App, which was demoed and discussed in a number of breakout sessions following the keynote. Click to watch the demo video:

The remaining days were filled with breakout sessions, and Super Sessions with Condoleezza Rice and Michael Lewis.

To be fair to Citrix, I must provide some constructive criticism and critique for next year to get better. I genuinely missed not having a Technology Keynote, and the clients I spoke to missed it too.
Here’s what we saw last year at Citrix Synergy 2017 (click for link and recording), and I really think Citrix should have included something similar this year, to go one level deeper than what was covered in the Opening Keynote.

Where was the deeper dive information that would have been covered in the general session Technology Keynote? Well…unfortunately hidden in nuggets of information throughout the breakout sessions. If you searched hard enough, you could find this information!

Due to embargoes, many sessions weren’t attended as well as they should have been, as the titles and session descriptions should have included more descriptive phrases and terms to learn more about technology that wasn’t revealed until the keynote. An example of this was the session I attended Tuesday afternoon with Steve Wilson and Chris Fleck, where they covered a technical details everyone should know about the new Citrix Workspace App. If you read the session title and description here, you’ll notice there was no mention of Citrix Workspace App…Since they didn’t use that product name in the title or description, it wasn’t well attended (in my opinion it should have been standing room only). Fortunately, if you missed this session, you can catch it online here:

The rest of the sessions I attended were all very informative, and many of them are already available on YouTube, as you can see above. If you want to review the Session Catalog and create weekend viewing playlist, you can use this link and find your favorites on YouTube.  Here are the session numbers that filled my schedule: SYN236, SYN106, SYN226, SYN131, SYN231.

The rest of the event was filled with client events, lunch and learn workshops, customer appreciation dinners, the notorious M7 Global Partners Synergy Party, watching colleagues present, and roaming the Expo floor. I was even able to grab dinner and catch up with the VMware End User Computing (EUC) Champions group and catch up with Shawn Bass and Brian Madden. You can see a number of my picture highlights below, or check out my Twitter profile to see the top highlights over the last week.

Watching my friend and CTA, Donald Wong, do a fireside chat, talking about his organization’s move to Citrix Cloud.

Lunch and learn events with clients:

Celebrating the official launch of Citrix Workspace Hub with Gunnar Berger, Richard Sah and Jim Pinsky (from NComputing).

FSLogix receives best of show and best new technology awards from TechTarget.

Dinner with the VMware EUC Champions team:

The Entisys360 crew, studiously watching colleague Troy Couch present on Hybrid Cloud architectures (yes, this picture was staged).

While there were many announcements and great times for all of us at Citrix Synergy this year, what makes me most excited is our clients. The connections we have with our customers, helping them on their journey toward organizational transformation is incredibly satisfying and gives me energy.

If you’d like to learn more about Synergy or any other events, feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or Twitter. Looking forward to seeing you at the next industry event!

Thanks and take care,

Dane Young, MBA
Strategic Business Advisor | Entisys360
My Twitter | My LinkedIn
Citrix Technology Professional (CTP)
NVIDIA GRID Community Advisor (NGCA)
VMware vExpert & EUC Champion
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