Article Written By: Ruben Spruijt, Field CTO, Atlantis Computing

More than 6,000 technology influencers and decision-makers are arriving in Orlando, Florida this week to hear the latest technologies and solutions at Citrix Synergy.

Last year, Citrix Synergy could be summarized with one word: focus. As an organization, Citrix made a promise to focus on the core components of its organization, including XenApp and XenDesktop.  When skeptics were unsure of the future of the company, Krill Tatarinov, the new CEO of Citrix, focused on Citrix core secure access to data, application, desktops and a strong relationship with Microsoft Office365 and Azure.

Looking ahead, the central themes of Citrix Synergy in 2017 will be different than previous years with an emphasis on experience, security and cloud. 

Experience

Customers are king in the modern workplace. However, in the past, the customer experience had often been forgotten. This year at Citrix Synergy, the user experience will be discussed and showcased at length by Citrix and vendors. Anything that inhibits or hinders the user experience needs to be addressed and neutralized or it will undermine the viability of the workspace strategy. More seriously, it could be an unwelcome disruption to an employee's daily tasks.

Two types of experience will be important to note this week: User experience and IT professional experience. Good user and IT experience is all about accomplishing tasks efficiently, smoothly and easily.

For instance, if someone is working from their mobile device, the security, application and data access must adapt. The same is true if an individual working on a RaspberryPi, laptop or desktop PC-- each experience must be adapted and best suited for that setting leveraging local resources such as H.264 and GPU. RedBull racing fast, context aware and integrated end-to-end user experience is key in the modern workplace.

As the workspace becomes more powerful and complex, the IT professional experience can be overlooked. As IoT and public cloud develops, the IT professional experience must continue to improve. A successful workspace strategy needs to deliver a secure, integrated and consistent IT professional experience across clouds, on-premises and public, across devices and across various applications delivery solutions.

Citrix and vendors will tout their latest strategies and products in place to achieve the ultimate user experience issues and how to tackle cost, complexity and performance issues. I expect to see companies demo and integrate with Citrix management tools to achieve some of this improved user experience. I also expect new, small, cheap devices to fuel the workspace, edge and IoT workspace solutions and I expect integrated workspace building blocks leveraging public cloud, state of the art hardware and smart storage software.

Security

Recently, the WannaCry ransomware attack hit at least 150 countries around the world, with many companies and organizations, like Britain's hospital system, being forced to pay the ransom for their data. Security attacks in a variety of forms, such as phishing, ransomware and Hacking as a Service (HaaS), are happening daily to businesses of all sizes.

With this in mind the need for a different view and execution of security is important. One of the angles to attack security threads is the use of networking security, with smart access, cloud analytics, containers and virtualization technology build in. This will be top of mind for users and vendors attending Citrix Synergy.

In a company, security must be integrated deeply. Quite often security professionals act as the ivory towers in organizations. Security must also fall in line with business consumers' and organization demands in a fast moving world. And with more moving parts than ever before, it becomes extremely complex.

Citrix has an integrated stack of solutions, which connects all kinds of networks on premises and public clouds. At Citrix Synergy, I expect to see SD-WAN and Citrix NetScaler Unified Gateway offerings discussed in-length, in addition to security analytics offerings as solutions to protecting businesses and individuals from security attacks.

Cloud

The cloud is often presented as a solution to all company woes, with a belief that it is flexible, low-cost, high-secure and low-maintenance. The truth is that the cloud does not solve all problems, and can often be more expensive and difficult to integrate with on-premises cloud.

As a result, the cloud does not run perfectly on its own. It needs solutions and expertise to solve its problems. These solutions and expertise will likely be a hot topic with more companies having migrated and adopted the cloud.

Don't be a lemming, Cloud first doesn't mean Cloud only. Technology influencers and decision-makers need to think twice about their options to smartly seek out the best options for the consumers. The majority of customers today use a private cloud or a hybrid combination of on-premises and cloud (mostly SaaS). Future hyper growth and endless possibilities are in public clouds. Public cloud is the engine for BigData, Machine Learning, Analytics and new ways of delivering applications to business consumers. There is a strong demand for architects to design the cloud for different circumstances and regions that will be discussed at Citrix Synergy.

##