Welcome to the 2019 Class of Citrix Technology Professionals!
Perrine Crampton
What a year! We received 90 applications for the Citrix Technology Professional (CTP) and Citrix Technology Advocate (CTA) programs — more than any year in the history of the CTP program.
During the summer of 2018, we restructured the program by partnering CTP members with Citrix product managers and engineers to form specialty product-focused groups. These smaller working teams have engendered greater trust and better communication between CTPs and product teams and, in the end, better Citrix products.
And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for!
In 2018, we welcomed seven new members to the CTP family. This year, we are welcoming — wait for it — 17 (yes, SEVENTEEN) new members!
Without further ado, we are pleased to recognize the newest members of the CTP family. Eight of our new members join us from the CTA program.
Anton van Pelt is a senior consultant with more than 13 years of Citrix experience. His focus is primarily on designing and building secure solutions such as Citrix Endpoint Management, Citrix Content Collaboration, Citrix SD-WAN and Citrix ADC. He also works on Citrix and Microsoft Cloud-based solutions to extend the on-premises data center. His interests extend much further, giving him broad knowledge in complex IT environments. Anton is active in presenting his knowledge throughout the community and at various congresses. He is also the co-author of Enterprise Mobility Management Smackdown, PQR, and User Environment Management Smackdown, PQR.
Country: The Netherlands Industry: Education, Finance, Government, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Oil & Gas / Energy, Public Sector, Retail / Wholesale, Security, Technology Technology: Networking, Mobility
Arnaud Pain
Arnaud Pain is an independent consultant, leading Citrix consulting service for Citrix customers with an emphasis on assessment, design, deployment, and issue remediation. He provides expertise in Citrix Endpoint Management, Content Collaboration, ADC, and Cloud product sets, and he’s a subject matter expert for Citrix Exams building (NetScaler 10.x, XenDesktop 7.x Exam, XenMobile 10.x and XenServer 6.5). He is also a Tampa CUGC Co-Leader, CUGC/E2EVC presenter, and VMware vExpert.
Country: United States Industry: Finance, Government, Healthcare, Oil & Gas / Energy, Technology Technology: Mobility, Workspace Infrastructure
Barney Norton
Barney Norton has been involved with technology to a point that has he has been exposed to virtually every specialty or area. A significant part of that is driven by his personality. While he has worked for Lucent and Citrix, most of his career has been in emerging technology with startup companies. That experience gave him familiarity with virtually every segment of mainframe, communications, core networking, storage, and more. He took that experience and used it in everything from support to sales and now as a practice principal at Alchemy, where he brings on new products that complement our offering for Citrix and Alchemy. In those roles, he has filled multiple passports with stamps from just about every industrialized country. He has spoken at a myriad of events and to thousands of customers, including every Citrix event in his career at Citrix.
Country: United States: Industry: Education, Finance, Government, Healthcare, Oil & Gas / Energy, Public Sector, Retail / Wholesale Technology: Clients & Protocols, Networking
David Wilkinson
David Wilkinson is an EUC architect with more than 14 years in enterprise IT. Working for a global IT services companies over the years, he has worked in various sectors such as technology, education, manufacturing, utilities, and, more recently, healthcare with his new employer Novosco in Belfast. David bring expertise on Office365 deployment within Citrix Apps & Desktops, and his main focus has been on mobility, app virtualization and cloud services. David is certified as a CCE for Apps and Desktops as well as CC-XAD-CC & CC-XAD-MAD.
Dennis Span is a Senior System Engineer who works for a large insurance company in Vienna, Austria. He has more than 15 years of experience in end-user computing working with a wide range of Citrix and Microsoft technologies. One of his main focus points is automation and scripting. Dennis shares his knowledge and scripts on his blog and is a regular speaker at various international events. He holds multiple Citrix certifications (e.g. CCE-V) and received his first community recognition in 2017 when he became a Citrix CTA. He is fluent in Dutch, English and German and proficient in Slovak and Spanish.
Diego graduated with a degree in computer engineering and is currently a senior infrastructure specialist experience in implementation, support and troubleshooting large enterprise mission critical and complex environments. He is a subject matter expert on VMware vSphere and Citrix environments and has strong skills in storage, network and operating systems. Diego is the author of the DIY Blog, where he helps people understand settings and new features of Citrix and VMware products. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter, where he shares posts from colleagues and the news from Citrix.
James is a consultant focusing on Citrix and Microsoft EUC and mobility solutions in the Sydney area. He has experience across many industry sectors, with a mix of consulting and internal operations-based roles. He is the author of Jkindon.com, contributes to multiple blogs, and is a CUGC Leader for the Sydney Group. He is CCE-V, CCP-V, CCP-N, Specialist Certified, MCSA Office 365. James spends a significant amount of time in the community space, be it via blogs, tech articles, or simply helping out with other community members behind the scenes. He has recently begun speaking at CUGC events (a big milestone for him) and has taken on a leadership role for the Sydney CUGC group. He enjoys helping in the Citrix Forums and monitors them daily. He also enjoys building basic tools where he can help out on projects with other people to build out community-based environments. He has spent many an evening dialing into to environments to help out with configuration or environmental issues, particularly in the WEM space and has been lucky enough to make some great friendships because of his community involvement. “Community gives just as much back as you give in.”
Country: Australia Industry: Government, Retail / Wholesale, Technology Technology: Clients and Protocols, Workspace Infrastructure
Mark Plettenberg
During the day Mark is a technical product manager at Login VSI, where he is responsible for converting customer needs into software solutions. Before that Mark fulfilled many roles including: EUC consultant, product owner, and sales engineer. Mark is regularly invited to speak at industry events as E2EVC, VMworld, local user groups and shares his vision on End User Computing. In 2017 he received community recognition from VMware as a vExpert and from Citrix as a CTA. In 2018 Mark became a Microsoft MVP in the enterprise mobility category. Mark is co-author of the annual “VDI – State of the Union,” the largest community driven market research in EUC and has written many blogs/articles about performance tuning EUC environments and the impact of new technology on user experience.
Country: The Netherlands Industry: Finance, Healthcare, Public Sector, Technology Technology: Citrix Hypervisor, Workspace Infrastructure
Matthias Schlimm
Matthias has worked with Citrix products since 1998 as an IT architect for Login Consultants in Germany. He designs and plans Citrix infrastructures from small and large enterprises with a passion for automation and scripting. He is the founder and main developer of the well-known Base Image Script Framework (BIS-F) to optimize, seal and personalize your images in a vendor best practices way.
René Bigler has more than 20 years of experience with the use of ICT in education. Today he works as a systems engineer in the public education sector for a Swiss vocational college. His focus is end-user computing in general and Citrix technologies in particular, including a wide variety of hardware and software related technologies such as Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructures, IGEL thin client computing and FSLogix solutions. He shares his real-world experiences and knowledge on his blog and on Twitter. René is a Citrix Certified Associate – Virtualization (CCA-V), Nutanix Platform Professional (NPP) and an inaugural IGEL Tech Community Insider as well as a Citrix Technology Advocate (CTA) and Nutanix Technology Champion (NTC).
Richard Faulkner has worked in the technology field for the last 22 years. He has worked his way from second-level help desk technician to solutions architect. He has promoted server, desktop, and application virtualization and is a strong advocate for the mobile workspace. Speaking engagements include presentations at conferences including CHECK, TechITOut, and Angelbeat. He has been certified with Citrix, Microsoft, VMware, and Symantec, to name a few.
Country: United States Industry: Education, Healthcare, Oil & Gas / Energy, Retail / Wholesale, Technology Technology: Networking, Workspace Infrastructure
Rik Roberts
Rik has over 10 years of experience in advanced web application delivery and optimizing and securing web systems. He has three years of experience with large enterprise SD-WAN design and deployments internationally and is an expert in Azure architecture and deployments. He holds the following certifications: Citrix CCA-N, CCP-N, CCE-N and 2x Networking practicum, Microsoft MCSE and MCSD
Country: New Zealand Industry: Education, Government, Healthcare, Public Sector, Retail / Wholesale, Security, Technology Technology: Networking, Workspace Infrastructure
Rody Kossen
Rody Kossen is an IT consultant, and his primary focus is around workspace delivered by technologies from Citrix, NVIDIA and Ivanti (formally, RES Software). Rody was one of the first to pick up the technology from NVIDIA to virtualize 3D Graphics with GRID. In his previous job, he gained knowledge about optimizing the User Experience over long-haul WAN connections. He is also certified and experienced in Citrix SD-WAN to further improve the user experience. Rody is part of a community Team RGE (Remote Graphics Experts), RDAnalyzer and speaks on events like NVIDIA GTC.
Country: The Netherlands Industry: Education, Manufacturing Public Sector, Technology Technology: Clients & Protocols, Networking
Ryan Butler
Ryan Butler is a technical architect at Milwaukee-based Ahead LLC, specializing in application and desktop virtualization, automation, mobility, and cloud technologies. Ryan has designed and deployed a variety of EUC environments for many industries including healthcare, education, government, financial, and manufacturing. Prior to consulting Ryan managed a Citrix Service Provider environment of more than 20,000 healthcare users spread across the United States. He currently holds a variety of industry certifications from Microsoft, VMware, and Citrix. Ryan maintains a blog, where he shares issues faced in the field and open sourced scripts that automate numerous Citrix technology functions available on GitHub.
Country: United States Industry: Education, Finance, Healthcare, Technology Technology: App Layering & Provisioning, Workspace Infrastructure
Scott Osborne
Scott Osborne (aka Ozzy) has been a senior solution architect and North Central regional lead at Choice Solutions since 2011, which is a leading business technology company and Citrix Platinum partner providing forward-thinking and innovative solutions to clients across the United States. Scott is a Citrix Specialist for Networking/Data Center, Citrix CTA, Nutanix NTC and lead for the Omaha CUGC and Omaha Nutanix chapter. He currently holds certifications with and is a certified installer for Nutanix, as well as holding Citrix CCP-N CC-SDWAN and CCE-V certifications. Connect at sosborne@choicesolutions.com or on Twitter at @virtualozzy.
Country: United States Industry: Education, Finance, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Public Sector, Retail / Wholesale, Security, Technology Technology: Networking, Workspace Infrastructure
Shane O’Neill
Shane is an engineer advisor working for Aetna, where he architects Citrix environments ranging in size from 1,000 to 35,000 users. He has a passion for developing automation and reporting solutions for Citrix products in C# and PowerShell and is the developer of a number of community tools such as the XenDesktop Farm Migration Tool. He has been a Citrix Synergy speaker multiple times, as well as speaking at CUGC meetings in Europe. You can find Shane blogging on citrixtips.com.
Trentent Tye was first introduced to Citrix in 2011. Originally an Active Directory administrator, seeing Citrix XenApp in action was immediately engaging and he sought to know more. Applying for a Citrix position with no Citrix experience, Trentent became a Citrix Administrator by promising to become an expert efficiently. From here, he was introduced to complementary technologies like Microsoft’s App-V and UE-V and became a Microsoft MVP in 2015, successfully becoming renewed each year. And finally, he achieved the CTA designation in 2017, highlighting his prowess in Citrix technology. Trentent is always interested in how everything plays together and frequently shares that information on his blog, via social media and with the local CUGC where he is one of the leaders. Always interested in opinions, he seeks out others and has discussions about leading practices, best ways to utilize or implement technology or what challenges others might be facing.
