Citrix Synergy 2014 and Big Data for End User Computing

When I started working at Citrix in the summer of 2005 in the consulting organization it was considered a special honor to attend the Citrix Synergy events (back then, it was called iForum and the format was slightly different, but we’re talking generally here about the large annual customer conference). As an employee, one had to have some sort of special assignment in order to get the authorization to go and my co-workers and I always scrambled to get on the list. A speaking slot in one of the many breakout sessions or learning labs would typically do it and many of us became very creative in terms of proposing a session and positioning ourselves as the speakers.

Since then, I rarely missed the event and I had the honor of speaking on topics of implementation methodologies and practices in the area of Network Application Delivery, WAN optimization, and later on desktop transformation.

Besides the big keynote sessions and breakout presentations, the exhibit floor was always a big draw at the event and one of the many reasons why we wanted to attend. This was the opportunity to speak directly with the various Citrix product and business groups, but more importantly with the exhibitors and technology partners. This allows attendees to get a really good overview of the entire ecosystem of technologies, partners, and competitors that make up the entire landscape around the core Citrix technologies of virtualization, mobility, cloud, and networking.

This year should be no different and I am excited to attend Citrix Synergy for the first time as a sponsor and technology partner. This will provide me with the opportunity to connect with many of my friends at Citrix and the partners and to talk about Lakeside Software’s move into the Big Data for End User Computing space.

Long before “Big Data” was the buzzword it is today, long before Google published the MapReduce paper that led to big data and its associated technologies, long before hadoop was a thing, Lakeside SysTrack took a big data approach to end user computing. “Big” because large enterprises generate terabytes of end-user data, but due to the highly distributed nature of end user data, have virtually no good way of harnessing the information contained within the data in a meaningful way. SysTrack started solving that problem in the late 1990s and has been on the forefront of data collection and analytics in de-centralized environments at unprecedented scale ever since then. Today, we’re moving beyond the IT centric view of machine generated data and we’re presenting unique and innovative ways to gain deep insights into the human side of end-user computing.

Sounds too esoteric? For those of you interested in the virtualization side of end-user computing, please stop by our booth at Synergy and let’s have a conversation about the established best practices in monitoring and managing XenApp and XenDesktop deployments – including the latest 7.5 releases. Let’s have a conversation about planning, designing, and executing the implementation or migration to 7.5. Let’s have a look at our latest release. We hope that you’ll like what you see and give us your vote in the Best of Synergy award election.

See you in Anaheim next week!

Florian Becker

[email protected]
Twitter: @florianbecker