There was tangible energy and collective enthusiasm around Citrix Synergy 2018, with a raft of new capabilities being announced - along with a real sense of direction. The overwhelming feeling from the customers that I spoke to was very positive.
Citrix Customer Innovation Award
Ultima was lucky enough to attend Citrix Synergy this year, hosting one of our long-time Citrix customers – Beazley, who are one of three finalists for the Citrix Customer Innovation Award.
The Customer Innovation Award is an accolade awarded by Citrix, through a combination of a judging panel and public vote, to recognise organisations who utilise Citrix solutions to achieve innovative results.
Unfortunately, Beazley were not the ultimate winners on this occasion, however I would encourage you to watch their video to see how as part of a business change programme, Citrix can deliver a workspace solution to empower your users.
Of course, we are incredibly proud of the work we did to deliver this solution for Beazley, and of the tangible value that the business continues to derive from it.
Event Highlights
So, what were the highlights of the event? Hopefully you had the chance to join our Citrix Synergy webinar, but if not you can view it here, or click below:
Workspace App
The biggest announcement was around Workspace App – this is the new edge of the user workspace, combining apps, desktops, files and SaaS delivery into an orchestrated and tightly integrated single pane of glass.
This is the new user experience from Citrix, and it certainly looks promising! Expect to see a deeper dive on this in the coming weeks.
One of the great new capabilities is around the ability to apply policy controls to SaaS applications using Citrix Access Control as part of the Workspace App.
This provides a flexible way of securely delivering SaaS to users and solves many common challenges, from identity management to Data Loss Prevention. Citrix Access Control will be covered in more depth also in an upcoming blog.
Citrix Analytics
Vying for headlines alongside Workspace App was Citrix Analytics which is available for trials NOW.
Citrix Analytics leverages product telemetry from your Citrix solution, and using machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) provides actionable insights across three categories; security, performance and operations.
The category available now is security, with User Behaviour Analytics (UBA) being the key solution.
The aim of UBA is to identify abnormal or “bad” behaviour, and to allow you to mitigate this bad behaviour with orchestrated actions – for example, revoking access to shared data, starting session recording, or blocking access for the user. These actions in the event of a breach, could limit the blast-radius of an incident or mitigate the impact entirely.
Multi-Cloud Collaboration
Citrix are fully embracing multi-cloud - further collaboration with Google Cloud Platform and Oracle Cloud was announced. This is fantastic news as many more customers are adopting multi-cloud strategies, and this is more assurance that Citrix are joining you on this journey.
Announcements
Many of the other announcements came from individual product breakout sessions, such as;
- WEM (Workspace Environment Manager) as a Cloud Service
- App Layering Cloud Licensing Support
- Support for OST and Outlook Search Index in Citrix Profile Management
- Citrix Provisioning Services support from Citrix Cloud
- New Quick-Deploy templates for Citrix Cloud in Azure
- Browser Content Redirection 2.0 – now able to support WebRTC
- A new Citrix Files (ShareFile) app consolidating the many options currently available into one client
- Citrix Intelligent Traffic Management (from Cedexis Acquisition) – providing internet scale Application Delivery Networking
And many, many more. It’s clear Citrix have been busy and there are many great new tools to help you adopt a Secure Digital Workspace solution.
Product Names
One last thing – product names. You may have noticed that some names have now changed and the “Xen” has gone.
Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop are now Citrix Virtual Apps and Citrix Virtual Desktops, ShareFile is now Citrix Content Collaboration, NetScaler is now Citrix ADC, XenServer is now Citrix Hypervisor.
A full list of product name changes can be found here. It will certainly take a while for everyone to come around to using the new names and expect the odd slip for a while!
Overall, the message from Synergy is that Citrix still has a few surprises in store for us, with some great new capabilities. And the best thing? Everything that was announced will be released within 90 days.
If you have any questions or want to know more about any of these areas, please get in touch. Otherwise please look out for future blogs where we will deep dive into some of the new offerings.
- By Andrew McCullough (Solutions Architect)
