Citrix Synergy 2019 Highlights

The Citrix Synergy 2019 conference in Atlanta was as big as ever, and as usual Kraft Kennedy sent a team of technical consultants to ensure we had the ground covered. Couldn’t make it? No worries. We’ve done our best to pare down a ton of content to the topics most relevant to law firms. You can watch our recap or simply read on…

In order to fully appreciate Citrix’ overall vision, and announcements made during this year’s keynote, you have to appreciate what Citrix has been up to for the past couple years. Specifically, Citrix has been executing a portfolio unification strategy whereby various products and services have been renamed and grouped into three categories – Workspace, Networking, and Analytics. They’ve also been steadily expanding their suite of cloud services, furthering the move many of us have begun, and we’re all eventually going to make, from on-premises to hybrid to cloud infrastructure and services.

Citrix Workspace

Citrix Workspace provides users with a unified experience comprised of various resources, features, and tools they need to be productive – virtual apps and desktops, SaaS apps, mobile apps, files and collaboration tools, etc. Related to this effort, former “Xen” branded products have been renamed, as have others. For example, XenApp and XenDesktop has become Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, XenMobile has become Citrix Endpoint Management, ShareFile has become Citrix Content Collaboration, etc. These technologies comprise the Citrix Workspace, which is accessed via the Citrix Workspace App. The App replaces the Receiver, XenMobile, ShareFile, and Gateway clients, and also includes an embedded secure browser.

Citrix Networking

Citrix Networking is a suite of technologies, most under the former “NetScaler” branding, related to application delivery, secure access, connectivity amongst data center and office locations, and to the public cloud. For example, NetScaler ADC has become Citrix ADC, NetScaler Gateway has become Citrix Gateway, NetScaler SD-WAN has become Citrix SD-WAN, etc.

This year, Citrix announced the following relative to Networking:

A new “BLX” platform for Citrix ADC, adding to the VPX (virtual), MPX (hardware), SDX (hardware + virtualization), and CPX (container) platforms. The BLX is allows for bare-metal installation.
Support for ADC high-availability in Google Cloud (as well as Google Cloud and VMware Cloud support in general, adding to existing support for Azure and AWS).

During the keynote and elsewhere during the conference, they also highlighted SD-WAN’s capabilities relative to Microsoft, including the following:

Integration with Azure Virtual WAN to simplify the “on ramp” to Azure and improve performance.
Improving the Office 365 user experience at branch offices by detecting Office 365 traffic, routing it out the local gateway as opposed to backhauling to the data center, and sending it to the closest Office 365 front door.

Citrix Analytics

Finally, over the past several years we’ve become less concerned about whether Citrix products work as intended, as they’ve become very good at this point (when properly implemented via a qualified vendor like Kraft Kennedy ????). These days, it’s become much more about how we can gather and effectively utilize telemetry from the various products we deploy. That’s where Citrix Analytics comes in. Citrix Analytics uses Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to help visualize data and gain actionable insights into utilization, performance, and other metrics from approximately 100M Citrix touch points worldwide.

This year, Citrix touted its decades-long partnership with Microsoft, announcing that Azure is its preferred and strategic cloud for customers and itself. Analytics now incorporates information from Azure, resulting in a staggering expansion from 100M to 2B touch points worldwide!

Citrix also announced Analytics for Performance, adding User Experience metrics to the Analytics dashboard. In the example below, you can see how users with a Poor score can quickly be identified, with drill-down to determine that Logon Duration is causing the issue, and more specifically that GPOs are causing the delay.