Welcome to our yearly coverage of Citrix Synergy Keynote, this year we are blogging live from Atlanta, GA.
The keynote starts with a nice monologue about the future and how technology will help to power the future way of working instead of getting on the way.
Citrix CEO is officially welcoming everyone to the conference and talking about has been delivered in the last 12 months, and it is a long list.
David presents this keynote in a type of story line, presenting the main character, Maria a new employee in the marketing department, she is very talented but is starting to realize the difficulty of getting things done.
One of the main issues of today’s workplace is employee disengagement, in fact according to David, 85% of the employees are disengaged at work.
Today’s technology is creating complexity, simple tasks like using the scanner in the office has gotten more complex than needed.
Citrix wants to help with this situation by bringing people and technology together.
In order to create that bridge Citrix is working to improve the employee experience, help the user to make common tasks simpler, accomplish things faster so we have more time to do what we supposed to do.
Context switching is impacting productivity, every 2 minutes we are switching between things, emails, IM, social media, etc. It takes us up 20 minutes to get back to the real work.
In order to do that a simpler unified workspace is necessary, where we work in a secure but intelligent manner
And with this the big announcement comes out, the Intelligent Workspace. A technology that will be available for Citrix customers before the end of the year.
We now have PJ to take us deeper in the journey of the intelligent workspace.
This platform will help to organize, guide and most importantly to me automate our daily work
The old Citrix way had a bit of ways of doing things and forced users to move around and didn’t help much with the context switching problem
But the new Intelligent Workspace will consolidate notifications, applications (virtual and local), files, recommended actions all in one simple place.
PJ gave us a demo of how the Intelligent Workspace looks like, on a workstation and very importantly in a mobile world
Any enduser facing platform has to have a great experience, so Citrix is looking to deliver a delightful experience that will e to be native and intuitive
On release day, the intelligent workspace will have connectors for common applications like Workday, Salesforce, SAP, etc
The list above is nice but how about line of business apps? Citrix will be releasing Micro-App builder with the platform so we can add those applications from the beginning, personalizing the user experience even more.
But not everything is virtual, we have local applications and we have a lot of them, because of that Citrix will also have support for local apps
With all these new services and data coming, analytics will continue to be growing but very important piece on this puzzle and Analytics for Performance will be key to ensure user experience.
PJ welcomes Microsoft (Brad) to the stage and we play a video of Microsoft CEO to talk about the partnership between Citrix and Microsoft
The first Microsoft + Citrix announcement is the DaaS service, it has been named Citrix Manage Desktops, this service runs exclusively in Azure
A lot of announcement for the Microsoft + Citrix relationship, see below
Not a big fan of these numbers but Citrix is saying that Horizon is 89% more expensive than running Citrix on Azure
We now welcome Calvin (product marketing) to the stage to share Security information.
Security continue to be a focus for Citrix
It is very important to know what is happening in your environment all the time and the Citrix Access Control Service framework
When one know what is happening then one can apply policies to ensure the right security is applied, with the right context
Access Control service has a lot of advantages for customers but until today it was only available for Citrix Cloud customers. Citrix announces the availability of the service for on-premises deployments
A great announcement on the security side is anti-keystroke logging and screen capture prevention. This is a massive achievement by Citrix.
On the analytics side of things, the technology continues to grow and integrations are now starting to happen.
One component that we have been missing on Citrix Analytics was geography locations but that is now fixed (almost, still missing South America)
As security continues to be key for Citrix, the workspace needs to be very secure too.
After a conversation with a Citrix Customer, we have David back on stage to talk about choice
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Rob is telling us why GCP
David has Citrix Cloud analytics actually runs on GCP
But this partnership is not new
Google Cloud (GCP) is now available for Citrix Cloud CVADS customers can use it as a resource location
Now in a rapid fire format here are the Citrix + GCP announcements
On the identity front, Citrix is now offering okta, Ping and Google with MFA
Citrix continues to deliver on choices and making that part of their main messaging to customers
And because of those choices, Citrix will be supporting VMware Cloud
On the Citrix ADM front the communication was light but PJ touched on it
On the networking side of things a big announcement is the ability to bring on your own hardware for ADC (NetScaler), this makes the offerings more complete now.
Citrix Only offerings are interesting
David is back on stage to recap today’s announcements that can compile in the following three slides
And this is a wrap, thank you for reading.