Holy smokes! Did you catch the license number of the blazing hot conference that whizzed by last week?
That’s right: Citrix Summit 2017 came and went last week — in practically the blink of an eye! — bringing with it loads of big announcements, bold, new strategies, and strengthened partnerships. It also brought a great deal of excitement about Citrix renewed focus, leaving employees and partners alike hungry for new ways to win together in 2017.
In case you missed it, Citrix bloggers brought their “A” game to lay out all of the exciting news revealed last week in Anaheim. From amped-up versions of our industry-leading products, to exciting new partnerships and acquisitions, to the principles that guide everything for which Citrix stands, Summit 2017 was the best of the best in tech and in teamwork.
https://youtu.be/Aon4PU1qjA8
THE NEWS
Right out of the blocks, in his Day One keynote, Citrix CEO Kirill Tatarinov brought out the big guns, announcing a new partnership with Red Bull Racing. Citrix has worked with Red Bull Racing since 2007, using its networking and virtualization expertise to keep the team at the pinnacle of F1 competition. As an innovation partner with Red Bull Racing, Citrix technology will support the team’s engineers, keeping them ahead of the competition at every turn. “Being able to get that innovative and tech advantage is the difference between being on the podium or looking up at the other teams. We have provided leading technology to Red Bull Racing for ten years, and now we are taking this relationship to the next level,” Kirill said.
The relationship with Citrix provides the Team with greater agility, enabling our engineers to work more effectively wherever they are in the world. Being able to innovate and react quickly to change is a crucial element of Formula One racing, and we see this extended relationship with Citrix as an opportunity to further support our engineers in developing greater car performance. —Christian Horner, Red Bull Racing Team Principal
We launched the Citrix Ready HCI Workspace Appliance Program to dramatically simplify the scalability and manageability of VDI environments for mid-market organizations. This is a big BIG deal because while large companies have depended on XenApp and XenDesktop to provide their employees with secure access to the apps and data they need to work anywhere at any time, mid-market companies lack the IT infrastructure, resources, and expertise needed to stand up VDI and secure app delivery deployments. I know, right?! So awesome.
But we didn’t stop there!
Citrix and Microsoft took their years-long strategic partnership to the next level, introducing XenDesktop Essentials — coming soon to the Azure Marketplace — which provides a straightforward XenDesktop service for delivering Windows 10 desktops on Azure that partners and customers can manage through Citrix Cloud.
Building on the Citrix-Microsoft partnership, we announced the general availability of the XenApp on Azure Cost Calculator, a convenient, easy-to-use web service that will provide you with a complete set of cost estimates for deploying Citrix XenApp on Microsoft Azure. This is a great feature in and of itself, but it’s made even MORE awesome because it was developed by women. That’s right: the lead engineers on this project were two of Citrix brightest female engineers (that warms the cockles of this writer’s heart). Citrix supports women in tech and that is just one more thing that sets Citrix apart from the pack.
We unveiled the integration of NetScaler Unified Gateway with Microsoft EMS. Together, Citrix and Microsoft joined forces to deliver to our customers a solution that offers conditional access for mobile users. YES! This solution allows IT administrators to define access control policies based on the state of the end user mobile device, which is well and truly awesome.
AND!
We had a cavalcade of product announcements. Citrix Lifecycle Management is now Citrix Smart Tools. Citrix Smart Tools are delivered via Citrix Cloud as a service comprised of several key components that don’t require installation. They accelerate and simplify the design, deployment and ongoing management of Citrix products.
There were new XenMobile Service Offerings! XenMobile is now fully integrated with Citrix Cloud, which means you’ll be able to deploy a complete digital workspace including XenMobile faster. And, the ongoing management of your workspace will be much easier with Citrix managing your workspace infrastructure.
But wait! There’s more! XenServer 7.1 with Long-Term Support will be available in Q1 2017. For the first time, XenServer is a long-term support release (LTSR), and is the only hypervisor to offer the option of a full 10 years of support, with its product lifecycle dates fully aligned with XenApp/XenDeskop. A full Citrix stack simplifies customer infrastructure maintenance with a single end-of-maintenance, end-of-life date.
The release of XenServer 7.1 with Long Term Support clearly shows the industry that XenServer is a strategic technology for Citrix foundation for innovation that spans the Citrix stack, such as the unique PVS-Accelerator functionality, as well as for competitive differentiation and for driving important partnerships like HPE, Nutanix, and others. — Calvin Hsu, vice president, Product Marketing
There’s more to good business than good products.
For me — and likely for many of you, too — beyond the amazing announcements about our products and partnerships, the thing that resonated the most was the Citrix Summit discussion of implicit bias in diversity. Sponsored by Nutanix, it was a great talk about how the attitudes and stereotypes that we are unaware of can undermine teamwork, led by Professor Jerry Kang, UCLA’s inaugural vice chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.
For me, this spoke loudly about the kind of company that Citrix is and the kind of company that I want to support; I couldn’t be prouder to work for this organization.
There was SO MUCH incredible goodness at Citrix Summit 2017 that it’s near impossible to get to it all here. It’s cool, though, because you can check out everything on the Citrix Blogs. And Citrix own Meri Summers has a solid recap of how Twitter and its ilk responded to all the good news last week!
