After a truly exhilarating week at Synergy 2009 spending 12-14 hrs every day trying to absorb as much as I can from all the geniuses around, I am at the airport waiting to board. I thought this would be a good opportunity for me to pen down my thoughts and share them with you all. I learnt a lot these past few days, and amongst them the most important realization is that Citrix is probably the only vendor out there that TRULY has an end to end virtualization solution. They make it seamless to the end user with the introduction Desktop receiver client that acts as a one stop shop regardless of whether you are using a fat client, thin client, mobile device or whatever else it might be. The other highlight from Synergy is that Citrix understands that their bread and butter product going forward is going to be XenDesktop and the VDI solution (VDI is expected to be a 56 billion dollar industry in 5 yrs). They are slowly shifting focus from XenApp to XenDesktop and it was quite obvious all through the conference.

As far as the keynotes were concerned, I thought Mark Templeton did a great job showcasing Citrix’s vision and showcasing their technologies. Most of the demo’s worked well. The key takeaway for me was the emphasis on Simplicity and how Citrix can make life simple for its customers with their end to end approach to application and desktop delivery (whether it be remote or in house). Some of the key announcements were:
a)  Citrix Desktop Receiver and integration with iPhone
b) Citrix Dazzle and how it fits into the Software as a Service model
c) XenServer Enterprise going free!
d) Introduction of the XenClient Client Hypervisor (although its not ready for primetime yet)
e) Netscaler VPX (Virtual Netscaler appliance for small-medium businesses and lab environments)
f) New advancements in XenDesktop including Flash remoting, multi monitor support, High Definition video (although the audio/video sync leaves a lot to be desired), enhancements in USB redirection etc

A few years back, I was really puzzled with all of Citrix’s acquisitions (Sepago, Net6, XenSource, Netscaler, Ardence etc) and wasn’t quite sure of what their end goal was. But now everything fits into place. I was also very impressed with their SaaS (Software as a service) model with the introduction of Dazzle. i think this gives many organizations, including my own the ability to bill various departments based on appication usage. Citrix’s partnership with Amazon in the Cloud Computing arena was also a very interesting development for me. I think the “pay as you go” model will work well for a lot of companies, especially small to medium businesses who want to reduce the administrative overhead and might not necessarily have the skills/manpower in house.

There were a lot of things that I liked about Synergy this year such as the iForum technical sessions, the various demo’s at the Expo, Dom Mcmillan’s stand up comedy session (if you havent checked him out yet, YOU MUST!), the various demo’s presented during the keynote sessions (particularly the desktop receiver demo on the iphone and the Xen Client hypervsior on the Mac!). But my favorite part about Synergy HANDS DOWN were the GeekSpeak sessions. It was great hearing from Citrix Technology Professionals and Industry experts like Brian Madden, Ruben Spruijt, Brad Pedersen, Jeroen van de Kamp, Rick Dehlinger, Simon Crosby, Jason Conger, Shawn Bass, Alex Danilychev, Benny Tritsch etc.. They gave a totally unbiased, highly technical and insightful look at everything Citrix like the VDI strategy and how its evolved, the future of Cloud computing, Security trends, the future of XenApp etc. The debates (like the one between Benny Tritsch and Brian Madden on TS vs VDI) showed how passionate these folks are about what they believe in. Truly inspirational! There are two key GeekSpeak sessions that I would like to talk about in greater detail:

  • The first was on Project Virtual Reality Check by Ruben Spruijt and Jeroen van de Kamp. Without getting into too much detail, last yr, these two guys decided to demystify some of the myths and marketing claims made by various vendors about peformance. So they built their on test environment, built a set of benchmark criterion/scenarios (totally unbiased and accurate I must add) and conducted a TON of tests. They then went on to publish their results to educate the industry on their findings. They also developed a tool for benchmarking that they give out for free!!! Totally awesome session. If you folks havent checked out project Virtual Reality Check, you must! You will be surprised at some of the findings (User density on Win2k3 was better than Win2k8 etc)
  • The second GeekSpeak session that I loved (more than others) was the one by Shawn bass on XenDesktop 3 and how far its come. Shawn Bass is an independent consultant and a CTP based out of Chicago who is highly regarded in the Citrix community. At Synergy 2008, Shawn presented at GeekSpeak on XenDesktop and basically concluded that its probably not ready for prime time. This was not well received by all at Citrix for obvious reasons 🙂 This year he looked at the advancements in XenDestkop and had a much more favorable opinion about XenDesktop 3. He talked about the advantages of going with a Citrix VDI solution (hypervisor agnostic, host platform agnostic, Host OS agnostic, Endpoint agnostic and connection agnostic) and also talked about the advancements in the new released that he cared about including Flash acceleration, Speedscreen Multimedia acceleration and USB redirection. It was as exremely information session, not to mention that hearing from someone you know is unbiased really helps!

Now coming to the iForum breakout sessions and labs, overall I was quite satisfied. Back when I was consulting, I have attended a number of Citrix Hands On labs. 90% of the time, I would find these to be half baked and totally uninformative for an individual with a decent background in Citrix technologies. This time at Synergy, I attended the XenApp 5.0 Hands on lab and was pleasantly surprised. The lab was first of all running on XenServer and the test machines were XenDesktop based hosted desktops. What better way to showcase your technology and make your customers true believers! For the most part it worked like a charm. The content of the lab was terrific. They covered key concepts such as Preferential Load Balancing, User Profile Management, Application Streaming and more importantly linkage between various streamed application profiles (in the past, if you had multiple streamed profiles that were not linked, file associations etc would not work well. An example would be if you had Firefox and Reader as two different application streaming profiles that were available to a user, and if the user launched Firefox and launched a pdf from within Firefox, it wouldnt work. This has been fixed with the linkage) etc. The iForum technical sessions that stood out for me were two on XenApp, “From A to XenApp” and “How to transform your XenApp farm from average to awesome”. Talk about cramming every minute of your 50 minute session!! I also found some of the XenDesktop sessions quite insightful. Unfortunately with the overlapping sessions, I couldn’t attend some of the sessions on Cloud computing that I really wanted to.

One observation however was that among the Citrix consultants, information seemed to be silo’d. You would think that every consultant within the Citrix team would know quite a bit about all their products. I did not find this to be the case especially when it comes to XenDesktop. I wanted to gain an in depth understanding of the various VDI options with regards to XenDesktop (hosted/streamed/offline etc). I also wanted to understand a little more about licensing. I was sent from one consultant to another (3 times) and it took about 20 minutes to find a guy who knew his stuff!

Twitter is another thing I wanted to talk about a bit. I’ve been using twitter for the past few months. I follow some of the Citrix industry experts and get updates on everything Citrix. But Synergy took it to a whole new level. Most of the CTP’s and experts were tweeting using a specific tag (#citrixsynergy). So by doing a search on the tag, in essence you could get the pulse of Synergy. They were tweeting in between sessions about which sessions are worth attending etc. Very useful. I also found out through twitter on Thursday that they were allowing people to register for odd numbered Citrix exams for FREE!  Needless to say that I went  and took one of the exams 🙂 If it wasnt for twitter, I would have to spend 150 bucks on that exam!

I have to be honest, I was a little skeptical going into Synergy this year. But now in hindsight, I am so glad I attended the conference. It was totally worth my time and my organization’s money. I understand the big picture now and I believe my organization will benefit from this a great deal!  Kudos to Citrix on hosting a FANTABULOUS event! Cant wait for Synergy 2010!!!

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5 thoughts on “Synergy 2009 – An analyst’s perspective.”

  1. George,

    Thanks for the kind comments. You must have been the only non-Citrite/non-CTP that stuck around for my session. 😉 8:30 pm is rough, and it is much appreciated. I’m glad you found the session valuable, and I’m happy to hear that you find Geek Speak the most valuable part of Synergy. I’m going to point out this blog posting to a few Citrites to continue to re-enforce the value of the Geek Speak track.

    Thanks again.

    Shawn

  2. George

    you did a great job recapping the event. I really want to thank you for speaking so highly of the Geek Speak event. I have made this a passion of mine by taking Geek Speak on the road and you’ll start to see more of this in the future.

    Great article

    Cheers
    Michael Keen, CTP CCIA
    Sr Solutions Architect
    Alliance Technologies

  3. Michael and Shawn,
    Thank you so much for posting your feedback on my blog. Much appreciated! Shawn, a special thanks to you for forwarding my blog to fellow Citrites. I have not been proactive when it comes to blogging related to Citrix, but hope to get a lot more active going forward.

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