Citrix Summit 2019 in Orlando Florida

While some of my friends went to #CES for the week,  I was at Citrix Summit 2019 in Orlando.  Sure, there were no roll up flat screen TVs or Smart Home gadgets but there were about 5,000 people packed into a Tech Keynote to hear about the latest and greatest from Citrix (and a motivational talk by Michael Phelps).

Some of the things that I noticed at Summit were :

96% of all Citrix revenue has been processed by channel partners; The 4% of you out there trying to buy directly from Citrix.com, give IPM a call. 🙂

ServTech was now bundled with Summit.  The ServTech portion was Thursday while Summit was Monday through Wednesday.   From my point of view, much of the technical content in the ServTech catalog was available the first three days.  It didn’t seem to offer much value (which is why they may have decided to piggy back them together).  The sessions I did attend though were pretty good.  Lots of information on the Journey to the Cloud and how Citrix will be positioning itself for this.  Expect to see more and more of this from Citrix and all tech vendors.

I found it super interesting that Microsoft was a Platinum Sponsor but didn’t have a booth on the Solutions Exchange.  The Solution Exchange is also one of my favorite parts of the conference.  I like walking around to the various vendors and exploring the eco system to see what new things are happening in the industry.  It was a shame they didn’t have any Microsoft employees on the solution floor at all.   There was also a certification lab and Hands on labs to try all the various products.

I think my favorite breakout session was a talk about the Rise of Dark AI (Artificial Intelligence).  Examples of how sophisticated attacks and scammers will continue to evolve and exploit holes and weaknesses in software and humans.  In parallel, the good guys will have to learn to share and enhance techniques to thwart the bad guys.  Fear of bad publicity complicates the sharing aspect needed to combat the cottage industry of malware and scammers. The talk was very interesting.

Since Cloud was one of the main topics at the conference, it was nice that Citrix had put real initiatives in place to make sure customer transitions were successful.  To this end, they had a session where they highlighted a new internal team called the Cloud Success Team.  My boss and IPM president, Phil Alberta was one of the guest panelists (the only non-Citrate panelist actually) who had the opportunity to talk about the way Partners (like IPM) and Citrix could work together in the field to ensure customer success stories.

Being a full time remote employee, it was of course great to see my colleagues and have a chance to hang out, bond and talk tech. 

For all you customers reading this, Synergy 2019 will be held in Atlanta GA in May.

Till next time!

–Carlo