by Barry Murphy
I had the pleasure of attending the Citrix Synergy event in Anaheim, CA.
Thanks to our partner Citrix for putting on a world-class event with excellent sessions, interesting labs, a comfortable exhibition area, and some great parties. Of note was the party put on by the M7 Global Partners that featured an in-demand cigar bar and a rocking performance by Thundherstruck, the female AC/DC tribute band. The Synergy conference was truly a great experience.
Experience was the theme of the week; user experience, that is. As Citrix CEO Mark B. Templeton said in his opening keynote, “it’s all about being happy.” In order for business workers to be happy, the IT systems they leverage must not be a source of frustration.
Citrix understands that, in order for IT projects to achieve success, business workers need an experience that will allow them to not only adopt, but embrace the solutions IT teams roll out. A good user experience is necessary for both business workers and IT. More than ever, IT teams need to control costs while also accounting for security. The challenge for IT is doing this in the context of the consumerization of IT. Business workers have very high expectations of being able to access and interact with information on the devices they want, where they want. In an increasingly mobile world, virtualization is one way to securely deliver applications and information to business workers.
To that end, Citrix showed how it aims to deliver usable solutions such as XenApp, XenDesktop, and DaaS. Business workers will be able to access desktops and applications when and where they need them. And, with ShareFile, IT will have a solution that allows for on-premise, Cloud, and hybrid storage environments – that is a powerful way to save money while maintaining tight security requirements.
What Citrix customers and prospects will want to remember is that one key to making virtualization and hybrid Cloud solutions work is a good productivity search (the ability for workers to easily find the information they need to do their jobs) experience for business workers. Desktop virtualization requires turning off operating system indexing in order to conserve virtual resources – that makes productivity search impossible without a solution like X1 Search 8 Virtual Edition that decouples indexing services from the client search interface that lives on the desktop.
It is the cloud search and hybrid environment search, too, that are key to making projects successful in today’s IT departments. Organizations store information on-premise and in the cloud and need to be able to search across all of that information. A majority of the cloud search solutions on the market today require downloading the content from the cloud in order to index and search it, which defeats the purpose of putting the content in the cloud in the first place. It is not just cloud search – it is the ability to search across data both on-premise and in the cloud, as X1 Rapid Discovery can do, that is required in today’s fast-paced, information-fueled business world.