Today saw the first day of the conference proper. Mark Templeton kicked things off in his inimitable style. I like the way he tones things down when talking to a typically reserved British crowd. No toe-curling renditions of how "pumped" he is and no enthusiastic requests for audience participation, as there are at the Summit event in Orlando. It doesn't go down too well over here and Mark knows that. It's always quite amusing in the States, the Americans sit at the front whooping and hollering at every opportunity, the Asians and Eastern Europeans sit in the middle not entirely sure what exactly is going on and the Brits and Irish sit as far back as possible nursing crippling hangovers, desperately trying to catch up on some sleep but constantly being woken up by the people at the front. Still, none of that malarkey for me today, I was bright as a button this morning and took 13, yes 13, pages of notes throughout the day.
The keynote started with some impressive figures: there are now over 1 million Citrix servers globally, 100 million users, 200,000 customers and 75% of Internet users go through a NetScaler box at least once every day. The latter I knew already but 100 million users was new to me. Not bad.
NetScaler took pride of place as the first topic of discussion. The release of the quite horrifyingly fast MPX line will take Citrix into a new world with regard to web app optimisation and will certainly get F5 hopping about a bit. Citrix Online delivered what we have become accustomed to: massive percentage growth. Distribution don't sell these products. More's the pity with over 100 million online collaboration sessions this year alone.
Mark compared Citrix to satellite television: simple, fast, on-demand, device-independent but with secure access control, dynamic capacity and predictable costs. They also both need a controller, a receiver and a delivery mechanism. A very good analogy in my opinion, particularly as he went on to announce the release of what's called the Citrix Branch Repeater (this is the branch office box that used to be called Project Evergreen and was developed in tandem with Microsoft. It incorporates WANScaler technology to provide content caching and network data compression).
Wes Wasson, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer (they're very resourceful at Citrix, everyone seems to do two jobs - Mark Templeton is officially called President and Chief Operating Officer), then took over and outlined 4 main areas of focus for Citrix:
1) Deliver web apps (NetScaler - announced co-operation agreement with Akamai Technologies)
2) Deliver Windows apps (XenApp - 35% of all licenses now Platinum)
3) Enhance the user experience (this is a bit more complicated but basically involves a) the Branch Repeater to cheer up those poor lonely souls who work outside company HQ, b) using Password Manager to give users just one password to remember, c) providing on-demand support with GoToAssist, d) monitoring and optimising their applications' performance with EdgeSight, e) integrating VoIP with EasyCall and f) using Workflow Studio to orchestrate, automate and compose menial tasks such as setting up a new user or expanding an existing user's capabilities.)
4) Deliver app workloads (the aim being to go from consolidation of data centres to dynamic delivery of virtualised server workloads with XenServer Platinum)
I don't have time to go into all of the products mentioned above in much detail here but feel free to contact me for further info. In time, I will try and post a bit more about each.
Just as I was beginning to think XenDesktop wasn't going to get a mention at all, in fact I wrote in big letters on my notepad that the word XenDesktop didn't once cross anyone's lips until 10:45, almost 2 hours after the start of the keynote, Mark T was hauled back on stage to announce it officially. I've written about this product in previous posts and my suspicions were confirmed. This is a big one for Citrix. Mark Templeton took the opportunity to remind us he had been there for 13 years and he said the XenDesktop launch felt a bit like the launch of WinFrame all those years ago. Quite important then...
The main point he made was that this form of IT delivery has to fulfil two main objectives. It has to be a high-definition experience for the user (alluding once again to satellite TV) and it must enable simple, real-time assembly and disassembly of the component parts for the Administrator. Citrix are calling it Desktop 2.0 and the bits that make up the end product should be seen as being attached by Velcro rather than the superglue used in "Desktop 1.0". Again, another nice analogy.
To get the best out of it, you should use a new machine that most of the Thin Client vendors have developed that includes something called the Desktop Receiver - an all-singing, all-dancing client that all of the other individual Citrix clients, such as XenApp, Access Gateway etc., all plug into. Desktop as a Service (DaaS) gives users the feeling of a fresh, new PC every time they log on. There is also a new edition of XenApp solely designed for use with XenDesktop. If you have XenApp already, you simply pay a small upgrade fee - as long as you're on XenApp Platinum that is.
The XenDesktop demo worked perfectly this time, I am happy to say, although that thing that "had never worked before" that I mentioned in the previous blog, didn't work. Although no-one noticed because it wasn't used in the end. And no, I won't tell you what it was. XenDesktop was the only live demo, all the rest were videos of Citrix Synergy 2 weeks ago. The audio did fail on a video demo of XenServer Platinum which was quite amusing but generally the keynote was a huge success. The cynic in me says there wasn't a huge amount that was really new, it was just presented in a different way, but I must remind myself that I live and breathe Citrix (well, from 9.00am - 5.30pm anyway) and am privy to a lot of insider knowledge. For end users (except those that buy licenses in the thousands and therefore also get that same insider knowledge), I'm sure this was a huge eye-opener.
I will go into more detail on particular sessions in due course.
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