Notes From The Road

By Sean Donahue, Senior Director Global Alliance Marketing

As I write this I find myself in an all too familiar place, Jet Blue flight 632 from SFO to BOS. Not a bad flight, direct and all the satellite TV and blue chips I can stuff in my mouth. Why am I on this flight week after week you ask? I am heading home after another amazing event at the new Citrix Conference Center in Santa Clara, California. Let me tell you, and I am not sure if I am violating any laws of secrecy here, but this place can be summed up in 3 words. A – MAZ – ING!! This is one of the most state-of-the-art conference centers I have been to. This is the Mecca of Brad Peterson’s (Chief Demo Officer) demo environment. I think it will prove more popular than the Great American theme park located next door. In fact, if I can be so bold, I would like to coin this building as “The Brad Peterson Building”.

I have been on the road all of July and now into August attending the regional All-hands events that Citrix hosts for their internal sales and technical field resources. It’s so refreshing to see a company like Citrix invest in keeping their own people sharp and ahead of the curve on the newest and greatest technology on the market. Each event had between 100 and 200 Citrix Gurus isolated away in secret locals across the country, and I was so excited that RES was a sponsored presenter at each and every event. It has been such a busy time, I haven’t even had a chance to indulge in one of my favorite guilty pleasures: watching cheesy homemade music videos on YouTube.

At each event, from Atlantic City to Santa Clara, we enjoyed “good” catered lunch while our team delivered the “Accelerate XenDesktop with RES” presentation and technical demonstration. One of my Mates, Jim Varner, spoke to the audience citing several joint customers that had used RES Workspace Manager to overcome some critical pain points that had been slowing XenDesktop deployment. In one case, it was our ability to enhance the basic XenDesktop experience with context-aware user provisioning of apps and data. In another, it was selective rights elevation per user role for certain applications. In all, the central theme was how to simplify long-standing OS hardening with legacy group policy, login scripts and the like.

These guys were all over Workspace Manager’s ability to separate the user settings and configuration from the typical profile structure and store in a private cloud-based infrastructure, simply, and most importantly with very little added back end. Some of the guys really dug the idea that RES was able to apply differing application settings to users based on their role without having to repackage the application for each group. I promise you, as a long standing SoftGrid (App-V) guy, I will blog a more tech savvy post on this subject. But suffice to say, everything I have been telling you for the previous 7 years can be done much easier.

The one that really got the teams excited was our ability to accelerate their POC cycle with our Automation Manager product. When Max Ranzau demonstrated how he could take a typical POC setup for XenDesktop / XenApp from over 8 hours and reduce it to a mere fraction of that, the audience took notice. You would have thought Halle Berry had walked across the stage by the volume of guys who looked up to see what was happening. I shudder to think their disappointment when they saw Max, and not Halle.

Let’s look at that a little deeper. You see, most of these guys spend over an entire day setting up the same infrastructure for a POC at each customer. The setup guides they use are very detailed and concise but some of the more routine tasks they perform time and time again take several hours. Things like applying the latest service packs, hot fixes, updates, oh my! It could be for Windows Server 2008 or XenApp, but the list of updates is growing and time consuming. What my buddy Max showed them was that by creating a runbook through Automation Manager, not only can these tasks be automated, they can be repeatable from site to site. Wow! Take an 8 hour POC setup and slash it to a fraction of that time. Now that translates into more time for other tasks, or more time for Happy Hour. Your choice. I know what I would choose. But you also need to keep in mind that these guys do not get billable hours for a POC, so now it is like RES Automation Manager is putting money back in their pockets.

Well, I am going to wrap this blog up now because in a few moments I am going to tackle my expense report for the RES-hosted Citrix Field Appreciation Party. This was an Epic party and a great way for RES to cap off an amazing several weeks of strengthening our alignment with Citrix from the field, engineering and executive level. What says great partnership like beef sliders and an open bar?

Next up? Notes from the road part 2 – Jeff Wettlaufer and I crush it in Seattle at the Microsoft TechReady event. We hosted a party on the roof of the Hard Rock for 500 of our closest Microsoft friends, and I guest spoke as the SME on User Environment on Desktops in a joint Microsoft and Citrix stack. I will give you a moment to catch up with your emotions on that one.

Signing off from 35,000 feet.

SeanDô