Patrick Sauerwein | @virtual_patrick

This year I had the privilege to attend a fascinating Citrix Summit & Synergy in Barcelona. Compared to the event last year in Barcelona and this year in San Francisco Citrix has a much stronger mission and vision statement complemented with its product solution. So what happened?

The top topics and story from Citrix stayed the same:

• Mobile workstyles – Any device
• Cloud services – Any Cloud

Regarding to Gartner’s CIO survey from 2012, Citrix covers four top priorities:

• #2 mobile
• #3 cloud
• #4 collaboration and
• #5 virtualization

Just for the record, #1 top priority for CIOs is Analytics and Business Intelligence. So a huge opportunity for the ecosystem to gain from $19B market and its momentum:

• Online collaboration and data sharing: $5B
• Desktops & Apps: $8B
• Cloud networking and Cloud platforms: $6B

Key metrics from the Citrix Summit ecosystem:

• +1700 attendees
• 900 CSA’s
• 374 alliance
• 192 SI’s
• 68 CSP’s
• 74 unique sessions
• 12% increase in partner productivity; 22% in EMEA
• 17% increase in product bookings

For sure Citrix also announced major updates to their product portfolio:

• Citrix CloudGateway 2: MDX technologies, @WorkMail (secure email) & @WorkApps (secure apps)
• Windows 8 on various product solutions (XenClient, AppDNA, VDI-in-a-Box etc.)
• ShareFile with StorageZones
• Next step for Project Avalon: Excalibur and Merlin Releases for WaaS (Windows-as-a-Service)

From an organizational standpoint Citrix changed evolved their partner and customer support with:

• Project accelerator (formerly known as Citrix Startup Accelerator)
• Expanded Citrix Ready program
• Opening Citrix NetScaler SDX platform
• Citrix Auto Support
• And one more [strategic] thing…the Citrix & Cisco partnership

The strategic partnership between Cisco and Citrix might fire up a little bit some rumors about a greater mariage. Cisco is the #1 aspirant to buy Citrix, not only mentioned by Brian Madden in 2010.

There also was a lot of social media noise on Twitter and Facebook, Citrix offered live blogging on their website with @djfeller & @chrislcampbell.

Finally the claim still remain: “To create a world where people can work and play from anywhere”.

While the keynote at Synergy was held by Mark Templeton, all announcements were released on the Citrix website and blog – great timing & very impressive for me when recognizing while tweeting in parallel! Makes it much easier to write a post for this blog ;).

Missing something important for you? Let me know your thoughts.

P.S. This post was written on my BYOD (BuyYourOwnApple) experience.