This is my second time at the major Citrix annual conference, and I will be posting regularly during and after the show. My first piece can be found here and covers what I heard from a new management team at Citrix. They introduced their vision for the future of Citrix, and the future of work. “Work is no longer a place you go, it is an activity and digital natives expect their workplace to be virtual and follow them wherever they go. They are pushing the boundaries of how they work,” said Citrix CEO Kirill Tatarinov.

My second post is on Windows Continuum. This puts the Windows 10 functionality on a lot of different and non-traditional IT devices, such as the Surface Hub gigantic TV, Xbox consoles, and Windows Phones. If you review the information provided from Microsoft, you might get the wrong idea of how useful this could be for the enterprise, and in my post I discuss what Citrix is doing to embrace and extend this interface.

My next piece is looking at several infosec products that were shown at the show, including solutions from Bitdefender, Kaspersky, IGEL and Veridium. Security has been a big focus at the show and I am glad to see these vendors here supporting Citrix products.

Speaking of security, one of the more important product announcements this week at Synergy was that the Secure Browser Essentials will be available later this year on the Azure Marketplace. This is actually the second secure browsing product that Citrix has announced, and you can read my analysis of how they differ and what are some things to consider if you are looking for such a product.

And here is a story about the Okada Manila Resort that was featured as a semi-finalist for the innovation award at the show. It was built on a huge site and is similar to the resort-style properties that can be found in Las Vegas and Macau. It will house 2,300 guest rooms when it is fully built and have 10,000 employees. Scott’s IT department has at least 100 of them full-time — plus contractors — to support 2,000 endpoints and numerous physical and virtual servers placed in two separate datacenters on the property. I spoke to the IT manager about how he built his infrastructure and some of the hard decisions he had to make. 

At his Synergy keynote, Citrix CEO Kirill Tatarinov mentioned that IT “needs a software defined perimeter (SDP) that helps us manage our mission critical assets and enable people to work the way they want to.” The concept is not a new one, having been around for several years. An SDP replaces the traditional network perimeter — usually thought of as a firewall. I talk about what an SDP is and what Citrix is doing here. 

Finally, this piece is about the Red Bull Racing team and how they are using various Citrix tech to power their infrastructure. Few businesses create a completely different product every couple of weeks, not to mention take their product team on the road and set up a completely new IT system on the fly. Yet, this is what the team at Red Bull Racing do each and every day.