MCPc Blog

Citrix Synergy 2012: Highlights for IT Pros

Last week, San Francisco was abuzz for Citrix Synergy 2012. The agenda was packed, as 6,500+ in attendance—including your MCPc team—were ready for the announcements, keynotes, breakout sessions, game-changers and more.

There were certainly more conference announcements than I could list within this blog post (my personal notes are more than 10 pages), but I’ll do my best to focus on the highlights and include links and resources to the details.

The Mobile Workforce & Cloud Services

From one product to an entire suite of innovative business technology, Citrix has grown its diverse portfolio aimed at two areas of focus:

• The mobile work style: including executive mobility, BYODs and workshifting
• Cloud-based services: including unified storefront, desktop virtualization, enterprise cloud networks, and cloud convergence

“Citrix is one of the few independent software vendors that offers competitive products

in cloud computing, mobility, virtualization, networking and security, and social collaboration.”

                                                              - Gartner, from a Citrix presentation at Synergy

 

Trends highlighted by Al Monserrat, Citrix’s SVP of Sales and Services, as the driving force behind the company’s focus include:

• Consumerization, forcing more IT changes in the next 10 years than any other trend
• Workforce demand for BYOD
• Transition from the PC era to the cloud era

 

(Sorry about the quality -- this is from my iPhone. From Group VP and GM, Cloud Platforms Group at Citrix Systems, Sameer Dholakia's keynote. So what IS cloud? For us, of course, it's anyplace workspace.)

Achieving Mobile IT

There’s a “life splice” happening, and it’s the reinvention of work-life balance. We’ve seen it first-hand with MCPc customers, as the mobile workforce is the driving force behind our new anyplace workspace™ mentality.

Executives and employees continue to demand the ability to work from any place, on any device, with full access to needed data and applications—while IT managers require the management and control to facilitate a mobile workforce securely.

New Citrix technologies highlighted at the conference that make this possible include the following:

• GoToMeeting with HDFaces is now available as a free iPad application.
• GoToAssist is now free for iPad and Android for remote support and IT management.
• Podio acquisition—the workflow management system for collaboration, including tasks, discussions, activities, data, social, apps, and more.
• ShareFile StorageZones that allow executives to choose where data is store (in the cloud or on premise) for optimized performance and compliance.

Many more were introduced or mentioned at the show. What others are you looking forward to using, or have you tried and already have feedback? We’re interested to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

From the PC Era to the Cloud Era

Just as organizations and executives expect to connect wirelessly over any device, mobility also requires the cloud and virtualized IT infrastructure, processes and data. A few Citrix announcements on the cloud front include:

• Project Avalon connects XenApp and XenDesktop. Wired (@wired) reports that Project Avalon “enables enterprises to transform some of their most important workloads, Windows desktop and Windows applications, to run on cloud infrastructure.”
• CloudGateway 2—the updated version enables enterprise mobility with attention to application management.
• Citrix Cloud Platform—the first commercially supported cloud orchestration system based on Apache CloudStack.

For more on how your business can grow, innovate and improve with the cloud, check out Citrix’s 2012 Innovation Award Finalists (VIDEO). It includes the stories of three different organizations (insurance, technology and education) that have each changed their businesses with Citrix cloud services and technology.

Your Thoughts?

What are the highlights from Citrix Synergy that you found to be of most value, and how are these technologies delivering your anyplace workspace?

Please share your comments or any questions from the conference in the comments below. 

 

Jed Ayres, Senior Vice President, Partner Management & Marketing, is responsible for driving MCPc's relationships with industry partners as well as the overall go-to-market strategy of the organization. He has more than 17 years of IT industry experience. Connect with Jed on LinkedIn.

 

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