What a great keynote, we got absolutely DDOS’d by people on the live blog feed and couldn’t get the information out fast enough, so here’s a blow by blow of what we saw today.
Citrix is back in love with XenApp:
A common theme throughout the keynote was Citrix frequently touching on XenApp and it’s necessity for customers. To paraphrase, Mark Templeton highlighted the importance of XenApp, “We love XenApp, because our customers love XenApp”. I think there was a subtle undercurrent here of acknowledging the XenApp turbulence with the XenDesktop integration and backing out.
XenApp 6.5 support has been extended for at least another year, extending support into 2017. Personally, I’m not sure about the validity of this move, it’s going to cause confusion. But for any customers currently on 6.5 with challenges to migration, rejoice.
A feature pack 3 for XenApp is expected, with support Receiver .Next, Storefront 3, better profile management and with improvements to the Lync optimisation pack.
XenServer 6.5 Feature pack 1:
XenServer is back in focus, growing in features and carrying forward. This was a very clear message from Citrix, XenServer is not dead, far from it, it’s going to play a pivotal role in Citrix’s Hyper Converged play and while melio was mentioned, not much detail of the underlying plumbing was shared. A figure of 5,000 IOPS was met with some confusion and we can expect a blog post to clarify on this one. It seems like an error.
Receiver x1 mouse is now available for purchase:
No words really, it’s a great piece of ingenuity:
http://www.citrix.com/products/mouse/overview.html
Receiver .Next and Storefront upgrades:
Finally, FINALLY, we’ll have a unified client experience across mac, linux and windows in Receiver .Next (formerly receiver X1). The UI looks slick and many of us rejoiced at this news.
Citrix Integrates with Microsoft office online:
I was surprised dropbox got in before Citrix on this one, but here it is. Nice work!
XenMobile:
XenMobile 10 boasts impressive figures on reduction of admin steps and requirements to setup. In addition to this Citrix Announced a new Worx friendly application for Salesforce, a Tasks and reminders app WorxTasks and an App SlideStream to allow you to integrate your smart watch into your presentations.
Following the mobile theme, ShareFile has received a new edition, Platinum edition offering E-signatures and close to unlimited storage on the ShareFile cloud.
Workspace cloud:
Workspace cloud is Citrix’s new SaaS tier for partners to help customers deploy XenApp, Xendesktop, XenMobile, Sharefile and even datacenter lifecycle management from a pre configured tier hosted by Citrix.
Workspace cloud is simple, you place two connectors (for HA) on your companies place of compute (data center or cloud) and the cloud can now control, provision, manage and automate your services.
Workspace cloud is so promising, it justifies it’s own blog post.
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Reinhard
Seems that you saw another keynote. IMO it was one of the worst the last few years. No vision, no ideas, no major announcements. Everything is already there since Summit. Well… we’ll get a new FP for extended XenApp 6.5 – how awesome! Mark T. wasn’t also the best today – he had better times. The demos were boring and didn’t work. Workspace Control, Receiver, mobile, greeeaaat! I think this was the fifth time during a keynote. Talk about CWC – release planned for Q3? They talked about that for the first time at Synergy in Barcelona few years ago.