Welcome to the Citrix Summit 2017 Keynote coverage post. In this post you will read a summary of what happened and was relevant during the 3+ hours of presentation.
Carlos Sartorius is taking the stage to welcome us after a pretty energetic start by a percussion band kicked things off.
2016 was a pretty good year for Citrix; partners and employees are being thanked by Carlos. A nicely done video rolled out to highlight the success of 2016, key things for me was the 1319 wins over VMware and 1035 ove F5. I know these are Citrix numbers, I’m wondering what their numbers would say.
Numbers for 2016:
- 4476 net new customers
- $82M+ revenue
- 995 new cloud customers
- 1814 trade up
- 25% customers with more than one product
- 99% penetration on Fortune 500 companies
- 69194 partner advised or fulfilled opportunities
- 98% product transaction through partners
So what is next for 2017, Citrix CEO Kirill Tatarinov is taking the stage. This is his first Summit event as he joined right after 2016 Summit.
The first message of from Kirill is “Winning Together” and makes an analogy to an Formula 1 teams and how everyone is important for their success.
Kirill announced a partnership with RedBull Formula One racing team. The team’s CIO is on stage talking about how their are using Citrix technologies. Citrix will write a few white papers to help share the use cases.
What are customers looking at today? 2016 was a very intense year for Cyber Security,even the US presidential debates had to touch on that point and that is also highlighted on this keynote.
So what is Citrix’ strategy for 2017? Cloud is the center of the strategy with Mobility, Artificial Inteligence and IoT.
Citrix Vision
Citrix Strategy
Citrix has officially announced the adquision of Unidesk but the best part is that everyone with current software maintenance will get the technology at no additional cost.
On the networking side of things, SD-WAN continues to be the technology Citrix is leading with but without making sure NetScaler is part of the equation.
The third pilar of the strategy is ShareFile, my second favorite Citrix product (NetScaler first), ShareFile brings enterprise grade file sharing
Finally Security, Citrix is transforming to be a service provider and Cyber Security will be on the areas they will focus, especially now that they are betting on cloud services.
Citrix continue to do a company-wide cloud transformation for their products, I think it will have a slow adoption but the direction is correct.
Citrix is now announcing Citrix Ready HCI workspace appliance program for the delivery of complete VDI solutions
On the cloud offerings Citrix is renaming some of their offerings with Microsoft. XenApp Essentials, XenDesktop Essentials are the new names but there is also now XenMobile Essentials for EMS and Skype running on Raspberry Pi.
Kirill has definitely strengthened the relationship between Citrix and Microsoft.
So what is winning in 2017 will mean for Citrix.
Winning together is important but keeping things honest and within values, I really liked this slide from Kirill
Kirill has left the stage and we have Citrix CMO on stage Tim Minahan with a short message about the conference sessions and what to expect during the next 3 days.
Carlos is back on stage to talk about the sales strategy of 2017. Win with secure workspaces, Win with Networking and win with Microsoft
Citrix cloud Accelerator is a program to help customers to transition from perpetual licensing to Citrix Cloud Services, trade up and transition options will be available.
Networking
Last priority is all about Microsoft
Citrix innovation awards are up on stage, as always really nice projects are highlighted on video.
Great summary slide of the strategy
On stage the new Global Partner Leader Craig Stilwell, a long time Citrix employee. Nice to see the grow from within. So what are his plans on this new position? Their are detailed on the slide below
The Keynote has ended, Thank you for reading…