Citrix Summit: Day One

Keynote

Carlos Sartorius, Worldwide Sales and Services VP, Citrix, kicked off the Summit with the 'Vision' Keynote, and welcomed the attendees before handing over to CEO Kirill Tatarinov.

Sartorious and Kirill

The headline of Kirill's speech, albeit yet without substance, was the Citrix strategy that is designed to 'help IT professionals become the heroes of the digital age', sounds interesting, a based on the principle of making winning easier i.e. better supporting partner covert opportunities.

Speaking of opportunities, we are being told that 98% of Citrix sales come through the Citrix partner network.

Kirill also announced Citrix's acquisition of Unidesk, their app layering tech, which helps to securely deploy and manage apps and desktops through XenApp and XenDesktop.

Other Highlights

Other info relayed was:

• A new pilot program for Citrix Service Providers (CSPs) who want to deploy workspaces leveraging CitrixCloud.
• NetScaler UnifiedGateway get integration with Microsoft Intune
• Trade-up offers for customers who have existing XA or XD licenses and want to move to CitrixCloud.
• A new Hardware Compatibility Appliance Program that lets hyperconverged appliances to connect to CitrixCloud.

The rest of the day I detected a strong security theme coming out with references to the US election and cyber security. A survey Citrix commissioned found:

• 83% say their organisation is at risk of security breaches because of the complexity of business and IT operation
• 74% of businesses think a new security framework is needed to improve security and reduce risk.
• 79% are worried about security breaches involving sensitive data

There was lots of talk about security through obscurity or complexity, which means staff try to find work arounds. This can impact an organisations overall security posture, and whilst this has always been true to the consequences due to more aggressive external players now are greater than ever.

The answer, we are assured, is virtualisation, containerisation, enterprise mobility management and visibility. How fortunate that these are areas in which Citrix have strong plays.

Virtualisation in this context is the remoting protocol, containerisation is the secure partitioning of data on an end user device, mobility management allows for identity, access management and revocation all from a single pane of glass which provides the visibility. So XA, XD and XenMobile.

A XenApp on Azure Cost Calculator was announced. It's a WebUI that provides cost estimates for deploying XenApp on Microsoft Azure. See link below for more info.

http://now.citrix.com/azure/calculator

There was also lots of talk about Citrix and Azure but I will cover more on that tomorrow.

Stay tuned...

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the blog post author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the author's employer or other organisations with which the author is associated.