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Welcome to my belated Citrix Synergy 2009 wrap up. Belated, well, because the conference ended Thursday and it’s now Monday. And most likely Tuesday by the time anyone reads it.
I arrived in Las Vegas on a sunny Saturday afternoon and spent the rest of the day hanging out with Rich Crusco. I took some pictures, met up with Steve and Alex.
Sunday was the CTP Summit, which I though went really well. I did provide feedback that a few of the product roadmaps looked weak and anorexic. Much of it is items I saw on the roadmap 2-4 years ago. Then there are a few things that are NOT on the roadmaps and they really should be. That being said, there are few cool things coming down the pipe that are based the feedback provided by the CTPs and other individuals.
The opening keynote was pretty interesting. Garr Reynolds opened up in spectacular fashion only have the following two presentations look pale in comparison. Mark Templeton presentation broke Garr’s first rule: Simplify. It was long and winded. By the time it was all said and done, my laptop and iPhone batteries were dead.
I did (and a few other did too) an interesting experiment with Twitter. Yes, we twittered the highlights of the keynote. What I found most fascinating was following along with other people in the crowd: Jason Conger replied to a tweet: “@joeshonk how exacty do you ship a virtual server?”
Steve Greenberg in response: “@jasonconger you ship VM's using VirtualUPS, a guy in brown shows up at your door and tells you to check your storage folder” And YES, two different speakers on two different days mentioned shipping VMs in the same context and shipping physical servers. I'm still not sure how to respond to that!
Surprisingly there was a keynote on the second day. If you missed it, you’re not alone. Most people didn’t even bother to show and those that did left as soon as the panel discussion started. Ironically one of the keynote speakers was a VP from AT&T. Ironic, not because of the iPhone relationship, but ironic because a big wig from AT&T is on stage while the rest of us in the audience can barely get a tweet out from our iPhones. 3G service at the MGM Grand, including the Garden Arena, was absolutely horrible. I don’t understand why, in 2009, this is still an issue. There was not much in the way of BIG announcements. However, there were a few: Citrix released v1.0 of the Citrix Receiver for the iPhone, which is pretty cool. You can download the iPhone client from iTunes, but for you Window’s Mobile users there is also a client for that platform as well. If you have the Citrix Receiver and you are anxious to try it out, you can visit www.citrixcloud.net and sign up for a demo account.
Other announcements include then Netscaler VPX and Access Gateway VPX. Both, of which, are virtual appliances that will run on XenServer. No pricing has been announces and the Tech Preview for both will be available May 18th.
Now I can’t forget to mention Citrix Dazzle. An interesting name for an interesting product. The premise behind Dazzle is to allow the end user to subscribe to the applications they want to use. Self-provisioning of applications to be exact using an iTunes like interface. You can even require management approval for certain apps, but there is a catch. While there mechanism is there to request the app, you still have to build all the workflows behind the scenes! So, in actuality it’s not a fully fleshed out product.
Project Independence was given a formal name: XenClient. The biggest surprise came from Ian Pratt whole showed us XenClient running on a MacBook Pro! This was a bare-metal hypervisor (type-1) and a hosted hypervisor (type-2).
The Expo floor was pretty weak. There were not a lot of vendors here this year. However, the usual suspects such as Microsoft, RES Powerfuse, DataCore, etc and a few new names such as Virtual Computing, Neocleus, RingCube, Whaletail, etc were on hand. Even VMware had a booth. They were even demoing their High Definition Multimedia capabilities inside a tiny, itty-bitty window.
Speaking of photos. The plan was to use pic.im and twitpic to post pictures throughout the day but that idea came to screeching halt as the 3G services at the MGM Grand was horrible! Anyways, I did take some pictures and posted them up on flickr.
Set #1
Set #2
Set #3
Set #4
Well, that’s all I have time for today!
Joe
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