After arriving on Sunday in Anaheim and Monday a day of of Citrix CTP meetings Citrix Synergy 2018 is really starting. Logically the day started with a general keynote. As a Citrix CTP we have the privilege to have nice blogging seating. In this blog I will both blog the keynote as the breakout session on this first day.
The keynote was opened by David Hansell, Citrix CEO. He started of comparing his hobby (flying airplanes) with doing business in Citrix where strategy is key. He followed with the fact that employees are working on 4+ locations during a day, followed by the digital transformation (diversity of apps, devices and workstyles). David was pointing out that IT infrastructures are complex and costs a lot of money to maintain. David continued about talking about the use case and partnership with Aston Martin Red Bull F1 Racing team (including access to application running on the F1 track to the persons in the HQ). Citrix strategic priorities are Unify our portfolio (to simplify user and IT experiences), accelerate to the cloud and expand to new areas. A workspace exists of Apps, Content, Devices combined with Analytics in a secure digital perimeter. Next Tim Manahan was on stage with the Citrix Innovation Award, which was one by Wago. David came back on stage with work should be wherever you are, followed by the Citrix Workspace App. Calvin Hsu and Carissa Stringer are demoing the Citrix Workspace App on stage, showing the applications (collections) and shares including SSON on SAAS Applications, starting apps by selecting the files out of different file locations like One Drive and a workflow. Calvin continued with the mobile Citrix Workspace App including the update Citrix Secure Mail (with nice slack integration to move mail conversations to Slack). Calvin showed the Workspace Hub by displaying his PowerPoint running on a Samsung Mobile Device. Next topic was the integrating workspace self service with ServiceNow, followed by the branding of the Citrix Workspace App. David was back on-stage talking about Hybrid and multi-cloud. David invited Diane Bryant (Google) on stage, which explains the partnership of Citrix and Google. Next on stage Steve Wilson about the choice of clouds of choice of hypervisors. He also mentioned day 1 support on Windows Server 2019, Embrace RDmi (RDmi based applications available out of the Citrix Workspace App) and combining SD-WAN with Azure. Steve continued with managed endpoint devices (Mobile Device Management, Desktop/Laptop Management and IoT Device Management) and new enhancements (Win 10 with SCCM co-existence, Mac OS X with FileVault Encryption, new device support like Workspace Hub, ChromeOS, Apple tvOS, Alexa for business). Dave was on stage again announcing Citrix Cloud for Azure Government. Next announced was the availability of Citrix Analytics. PJ Hough came on stage starting with securing your digital perimeter and how Citrix Analytics is handling this. PJ is announcing Citrix Cloud App Portal, SD-WAN service for Managed Service Providers (MSP) and Citrix Intelligent Traffic Management. PJ continued with demoing the secure browser including showing a watermark logo, copy/paste regulations and monitoring usage within SaaS applications, followed by it looks from the administrator interface. And all stuff shown is available now or within 90 days. Next on stage was Christian O’Reilly with a demo of the Citrix Workspace showing SSON with face recognition using SaaS APIs and only use a part of this application. Unfortunate the demo actually fails partly.
After the keynote I went to the Insider Track of Liquidware, Igel and NVIDIA. In this limited event all three parties updated us with their latest developments within their product suites with some nice food and drinks.
Next I attended the session Manage your user experience from Workspace Environment Management Service provided by Wayne Liu and Pierre Magmignon. Pierre started off to explain where WEM came from and also mentioning that Transformer will replace Desktop Lock for setting up a locked down connecting device (Thin Client). Next they continued with the new WEM service in Citrix Cloud. Pierre showed the on-premises components and that is now all enclosed in the Citrix Cloud, so you don’t have bother about that part anymore. Also the Centralized Management is web based offered from the Citrix Cloud. Next topic was high reliability of the service realized by the NetScaler Service and Azure SQL database. Also the communication paths were described (with the Cloud Connector). There will be an import functionality for current WEM on-prem infrastructures. On-prem will still be supported but will use Cloud first strategy for new features. Next via demos the set-up process was shown (setup Citrix Cloud Connector, copy the ADMX template, Install/Register the WEM agent and configure optimization within WEM service. They continued with Optimizing Office 365 user experience (seamless roam Office 365 Outlook e-mail cache + search index database on a per-user index base). Currently only 32bit version of Office, unfortunate. Now it’s in private technology preview and will probably available within 90 days. They also showed the features in a demo. There also WEM integration with Endpoint Management (resource optimization, workspace experience config, transformer, physical and hosted endpoints, available through Citrix Cloud).
Last session of the day was Deliver the best user experience for your customers and user with Intelligent Traffic Management (Cedexis). Raj started off explaining Enterprise – Application Delivery Networking, followed by SaaS/Multi-Cloud Application Delivery Networking. After this pretty long introduction Steven Lyons took over explaining the former Cedexis product. They are checking on the route healthy and fast (Radar Tag), is the service running (Low Latency Check) and is the application healthy (Actionable 3rd party data) arranging Intelligent Traffic Management. Steven continued with the integrated hybrid multi-cloud (POP selection with ITM, use GSLB for NetScaler for the load balancing later on) and ITM Authoritative DNS service (according the quickest DNS service). Steven continued with some user cases (LinkedIn, Bloomberg and Microsoft).