The JBGeorge Tech Blog

Hello from San Fran!

Boy, what a day at Day 1 of the Citrix Synergy event.  I’m kicking back at the Serrano Hotel after a long day of meeting, greeting, networking, and learning at they event.  Made a lot of new friends today, and got to touch base with a lot of old acquaintences. 

I had a lot of high hopes for the conference this week.  And the keynote got it off to a rocking start.

I was particularly interested in the OpenStack announcement, but there was a ton of great announcements and demos today.  Also had some great meetings with the press today since Dell was a part of the announcements. 

Here are some of the highlights I found interesting…

• First off, the OpenStack news – Citrix announced “Project Olympus” which would include a Citrix distribution of OpenStack and a cloud-optimized version of XenServer.   There’s an early access program that customers can engage in to work with Citrix, Dell, and Rackspace to get things kicked off there.  Check out more at my blog on it here.
    
• Google did a pretty cool thing by doing a demo with the Citrix crew on stage, and then proceeded to give away about 100 Chromebooks to keynote attendees.  Unfortunately, I was not one of them. 
    
• Citrix CEO Mark Templeton did a great job of pitching a nice connected story of BYO-ThreePC – Personal Cloud, Private Cloud, and Public Cloud.
    
• Citrix showcased a couple of new new NetScaler products – Cloud Gateway to helps in orchestrating web and windows apps, and Cloud Bridge to connect cloud data, directory, web, and apps between public and private clouds.
   
• Great demos on the new and improved Citrix Receiver.  Lots of nice UI updates, drag and drop, etc.  And features are translated into the administration side of things as well.  It was also cool to see Android apps running in Windows via Citrix Receiver.  Things are becoming seamless….
    

Some great quotes:

Live from Citrix Synergy 2011...

• Citrix’s mantra = “Whatever, whenever, wherever” – I like it.  (Also heard a lot of “any, any, any”.)
• “Don’t encrypt the laptop – encrypts the data.”
• Consumerization is a major force and will force changes in IT
    

 OK, well that’s all I’ve got in me for tonight – there was a ton more – feel free to comment about items you found interesting. 

I’ll be back tomorrow with another update.

Until next time,

JOSEPH
@jbgeorge