AKIBIA'S PRACTICAL GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Citrix Synergy 2011
The floor at the Moscone West Conference Center was swarming with Synergy Attendees. The day started with a session on BYO Tablets, Computers and Smart Phones. The attendance at this session was impressive, a clear sign that many organizations are faced with the challenges of supporting personal end user devices.
Mark Templeton's Key Note kicked off mid-morning...and again was standing room only. Mark started by welcoming Kaviza to the Citrix family and quickly moved on to consumerization and the impact on IT. Mark emphasized the need to embrace consumerization and classified it as the "Personal Cloud", explaining how IT needs to link the Personal Cloud, Private Cloud and Public Cloud to provide a productive end user experience.
There were several interesting announcements....
- Citrix GoToMeeting has released a new feature called HD-Faces. HD-Faces integrates High Definition video conferencing into the GoToMeeting product at no additional cost.
- Citrix XenClient 2 is being released, providing a more robust client side hypervisor for mobile laptop users. The new release includes an expanded list of compatible hardware devices and also includes support for Non-vPro based systems. The Tech Preview will be available online later.
- Citrix XenClient XT is designed for extremely secure environments. XenClient XT provides significant isolation enhancements to secure the mobile virtual desktop and will be available June 2011.
- The latest release of Citrix Receiver supports Fast Application Switching, Jail Break Detection and Double Pass Encryption.
- Citrix Receiver for the Web was announced today. This is a web based client that requires no installation and will work with any web browser. During the announcement Google's Amit Singh, VP Enterprise Services, demonstrated Citrix Receiver for the Web on a Samsung Google ChromeBook. At the end of the presentation Google gave away 100 ChromeBooks to audience members.
- Citrix announced their latest cloud offerings, NetScaler Cloud Gateway and NetScaler Cloud Bridge. These products will allow organizations to provide access to their Private Cloud and link their Private & Public Clouds, providing a seamless end user experience for accessing resources. NetScaler Cloud Bridge allows organizations to host applications on a Public Cloud, but the backend database can be hosted internally on the Private Cloud - this is significant, as companies may be hesitant to host their data with a third party cloud provider.
- Citrix and BlueStack Systems have created a Citrix Receiver plug-in that allows users to run Apple and Android Market applications on any device. For example, a Doctor using a medical app designed for the iPad can now access that same application from his desktop system.
The Key Note was closed with a very unexpected surprise - Citrix demonstrated the delivery of a hosted Mac OS X virtual desktop via Citrix Receiver...
