After a quick breakfast in the press room we headed down to get
our prime seating at the Day 1 Keynote for the 25th Citrix Synergy
event. As the Hall began to fill up, Synergy TV did some interviews and
behind-the-scenes looks at what goes into making this event such a
success year after year.
They started with "The iBand" playing a few songs using ipads and
other mobile devices to rock live on the stage. They did experience a
little lag at some points during the performance but not bad for doing
it live.
At 9am the Keynote kicked off with with Mark Templeton (CEO of Citrix) taking the stage dancing and lip syncing to “Happy” by Pherrel Williams.
Mark started by announcing the following:
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81 Sponsors of Synergy this year, 10,000 registered attendees, 300 hours of sessions, 66 countries.
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Partnership around Intel, HP and Citrix.
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Ultimate Mobile Device = You
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Innovation Awards: Autodesk, Taco, Westpac Bank and BT Global Services were nominated.
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Autodesk wins the Innovation Award.
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1.4 Million business-ready desktops delivered by CSPs, SIs, ISVs and Solution Advisors
- 100 Infrastructure CSPs
Next up was Neil Lock – BT Global Services Director, BT Computer
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Built most globally diverse choice of cloud services delivered in 12 months and delivered locally.
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300% growth as a service provider.
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BT Compute Managed Services has 4 parts – Cloud Solutions, Brokering
& Cloud Aggregation, Cloud Infrastructure, and Cloud Enabling.
Next Mark Templeton took the stage and talked about the BT relationship:
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FileShare – 45,000 business customers and went from zero to 1 Million licenses in less than a 18 months.
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With 2 Customers with more than 75,000 employees.
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Mark shared a story about a vault in Iraq where the enemy tried to
break into a vault and used every explosive in their arsenal to try and
breach it with no success. A team later calculated that if they had
just changed their point of view by 90 degrees they would have been able
to enter the vault with only 10% of the explosives that they used.
Point being - Looking at things with a different point of view is
important.
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Mark gave us a flashback to him in Engineering school
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Mobile Workspace – productivity and agility for people, business and IT.
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People don't join organizations - Organizations join people
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Citrix Receiver comes in 3 flavors
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Apps – Native apps (Mac, iOS, Blackberry, Windows Phone)
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Browser – Safari, Chrome, iE, Firefox
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Appliances – TCO and Agility (like AppleTV)
Video from Google – Ahmed speaks about BYOD and chromebooks and about working closely with Citrix to bring you joint innovation.
Chrome OS Receiver – Tech Preview Q3'2014 will enable Printing, USB, clipboard, touch, webcam and 2-way audio.
Next Marcel Calef – Senior Software Engineer, gave a
Demo of a 3D application using the local GPU for rendering on a Virtual
Desktop. He also mentioned that Citrix is in the process of converting
from DirectX to OpenGL so that it can work on Mac clients.
MACs are becoming a bigger part of the BYOD market.
Citrix Receiver release X1 – Putting Experience First. One touch access to your mobile workspace.
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Unified backend infrastructure with HDX & MDX support with new UX architecture.
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Customize – your Branding
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Dynamic – New smart categories, device and role context.
Richard Hayton – Receiver Architect & Magician gives a demo of the new Citrix Receiver release.
Old ways - Office | Company | Wired | Monolithic | Suites | Premise
New Reality – Mobile | Personal | Wireless | Mash-up | Stores | Hybrid
Connecting People that have tasks to do with the apps and data that
they need to complete the task. This is what we are trying to do.
Problem – How do you provide Experience first in a world of hybrid devices and services.
Answer – Don't own Stuff as a strategic idea and focus on the services that connect them.
Next they showed a video about a winery and how they are using
receiver. Unfortunately it was in spanish and the subtitles where down
too low on the screens for anyone to see them from where they were
seated.
Steve Daheb, CMO
Started with the Cloud, next came mobile and now we are in the age of
experience, where performance and connectivity is important.
Steve talked about how everything is tied together to create an exceptional user experience in the mobile workspace.
Apps Data Collaboration
Next up was Catherine Courage - SVP, Customer Experience
Anticipate | Empower | Seamless
The Workspace Experience Demo
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Brad Peterson – Senior Director Business Development, Chief Demo Officer
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Worx has added Mail & Calendar integration that allows you to
join a meeting by dialin with just one touch (automatically dials and
enters the meeting pin). Also has Running Late which allows you to open
an email addressed to everyone invited to the meeting to let them know
you are running late.
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WorxNote preview – Capture, Store and Share notes. Notes can capture text, photo and audio and store to FileShare.
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ShareFile – integrates with Dropbox to allow you to move items from
Dropbox into the private ShareFile area allowing you to separate
“personal” vs. “business” data.
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WorxDesktop – Allows you to connect to a remote computer and edit
documents remotely from an iPad. Allows you to run non-native
applications on any device.
Steve Daheb talks about the key components of the workspace.
To finish out the keynote an emotional Mark Templeton took the stage
once again and discussed the history of Citrix and where it's going in
the future.
1989 to 2014
Remote Access > Virtualization > Networking > Collaboration > Cloud > Mobile Workstyles
2014 to future
Culture + Empathy
Leaving the world a better place than the way we found it.
Citrix Workspace Services using Microsoft Azure
Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President Cloud Services talks about the partnership between Microsoft and Citrix.
Mitch Parker, GM and VP Workspace Services group
Off to the show... and then getting ready for Day 2 Keynote address.