Ash and Ed’s Florida Adventure

Ashley Barlow and Ed Morton have recently spent a few days across the pond in the beautiful Orlando, Florida for Citrix Summit 2020.

Soaking up both the sun and a wealth of knowledge from Citrix experts on all the upcoming changes to the technology, as well as new products!

This year is the first-ever year that we have sent people over to the event. It’s been incredible to see how the event has gone and to get first-hand information, pictures and videos.

Ashley has written up a summary of their hectic and exciting adventures at Citrix Summit.

You can also see Ashley deliver a seminar along with expert speakers from Citrix and IGEL at our upcoming event: Citrix Summit Re:loaded, click here to find out more.

Sunday:

After a long flight across the Atlantic, we arrived in Orlando with a couple of hours to spare before going to the Citrix UK and Ireland Partner dinner.

We met with the Citrix team at Lafayettes and shared food and drinks with some of the best people in the industry.

We also spent a good chunk of the evening with our Partner Account Manager (PAM) Brian Connelly who was later announced as EMEA and Worldwide PAM for Citrix! Congrats Brian!

Monday:

We had an early start to get registered into the conference where we collected our lanyards and free backpacks.

We got ourselves familiar with the locations of the breakout sessions and made our way to the opening keynote.

Here are some key takeaways from the opening keynote:

• User Experience is key to being a successful organisation. Citrix delivers the best UX with their Workspace bolstered with MicroApps service, and Performance Analytics.
• Value propositions are no longer just for business outcomes and objectives. They also have to cater for employee engagement.
• “Good enough” in Enterprise IT, is no longer good enough.

We then attended some technical clinics and sales breakout sessions to learn more about Citrix Cloud, Microapps, Pre-Sales engagements, and round tables with lead architects.

In the evening we went for food and drinks at Bahama Breeze hosted by TechData and spent time with their amazing team.

Tuesday:

This was another early start for us, so we could get to the day 2 keynote.

We got to see product demonstrations of new security features, performance analytics, and workspace intelligence.

We’re hoping to get our hands on some demos of these to show our customers these ASAP!

On stage, PJ Hough (Citrix, Chief Product Officer) and Brad Anderson (Microsoft, Vice President of M365) showcased the partnership between Citrix and Microsoft and what the priorities and alignments of the partnership are for 2020.

There was a big focus around Windows Virtual Desktop, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft Teams.

We were then treated to a presentation from Carey Lohrenz (US Navy 1st Female F14 Pilot) where she discussed the importance of teamwork, leadership, and communication.

Something that resonated with me was when she was discussing the importance of simplifying complicated concepts to build trust and relationships (in her world, that’s explaining how a plane flies)…

“If you can’t explain something complicated on a cocktail napkin with a fat sharpie marker, you’re gonna lose some people”.

I’m a big advocate of whiteboarding solutions in the simplest way possible!

After the keynotes, it was another busy afternoon of breakouts where we learnt about Citrix Managed Desktops, Windows Virtual Desktops. I also attended a self-paced lab for Citrix ADC.

Tuesday night was the partner event at Universal Studios where Citrix had hired out the park after hours (7 PM – 11:30 PM) which was a bit of a crazy dream really.

Ed and I managed to get on loads of rides, with no queues, and lots of food and drinks too – all courtesy of Citrix!

Wednesday:

The schedule for Wednesday was a lot of repeat sessions. So, we took ourselves to the Islands of Adventure in the Universal Studios park to relax.

We digested the past few days of content and discuss how we could turn the new information into a plan for Axess Systems.

Oh and had a little bit of fun too!

Citrix Summit 2020 was incredible!

We hope to be returning to Citrix Summit in 2021!

Thanks for an amazing event!

So…

Now that Ash and Ed have experienced all the incredible Citrix Summit 2020 updates first hand, that brings me to say that in just over a month we will be hosting a UK recap event!

Citrix Summit Re:loaded, hosted by Axess Systems, Citrix and IGEL is on Thursday 27th February.

This event will be an afternoon of information you don’t want to miss.

At the beautiful venue of the Nottingham Motorpoint Arena. The event kicks off with a free buffet lunch at 12 PM, followed by an afternoon of expert speakers and networking with IT experts from across the UK.

To see the full agenda and to sign up for this event click here.