This week, myself, Gary Cohen and Jody Elkins are attending Citrix Summit in Anaheim, California, along with many Citrites and Citrix partners from across the globe.
Summit is Citrix’s sales kick-off and the main Citrix event of the year focused on partner enablement, so it’s a key event for Insentra to build our relationship with Citrix and our partners.
Citrix Summit is the essential business development conference for partners. Partners who attend gain firsthand insight into Citrix strategy for digital business transformation through intensive technical, sales and business training that delivers the tools to strengthen relationships, take advantage of market opportunities and pave the way for new deals.
2016 was a big year for with a new CEO and a renewed focus on their core products. Kirill Tatarinov recently hinted at some structural changes to the organisationthat should result in acceleration of further changes at Citrix in 2017.
At the first Melbourne Citrix User Group meeting last December, I presented the following overview of the timeline for Citrix over 2016 with a few things coming up in 2017.
While this doesn’t cover everything, you can see how busy Citrix was over 2016, delivering multiple releases for XenApp and XenDesktop along with key new NetScaler features including NetScaler MAS and CPX. Additionally Citrix have been delivering continuous updates to the Citrix Cloud service making it a compelling platform for organizations with new or existing Citrix services, looking to move their management platform into the cloud.
Tomorrow morning is the keynote where we expect to hear more about Citrix’s plans for 2017 and beyond as well as some product updates and additional announcements. One of those announcements will be something very exciting for XenApp and XenDesktop customers and I’ll cover that in more detail later this week.
One theme that I see with the new releases and updates to XenApp/XenDesktop that Citrix has provided over 2016, is being able to more with what you already own. With the release of XA/XD 7.12, Citrix has provided feature parity for XenApp 6.5 that has prevented many organizations migrating to 7.x. The acquisition of Norskale has brought some very interesting and compelling User Environment Management features now built into the product, that will have a great impact on end-user experience.
Citrix has also made some interesting play with NetScaler in 2016 too. The NetScaler MAS platform provides some amazing analytics and management capabilities to NetScaler. NetScaler CPX is all about the future (for the majority of us, at least) with a reorganisation of applications into micro-services and containers.
As I’m writing this article, Gary is attending the Partner Technical Expert Council (PTEC) to receive in-depth updates on Citrix products and to provide input into the future roadmap. Being invited to PTEC provides Insentra with an opportunity to gain insights from Citrix before anyone else and it’s a real honour to be only one of two partners from APJ at PTEC this year.
If you’re one of our partners here at Summit we look forward to sharing the event with you. If you’re a customer and would like to understand more about the announcements here at Synergy, we can engage with your partner and provide you overview and insights.
Tomorrow I’ll provide a summary of the key announcements.
