Citrix Synergy

I just came back home from Citrix Synergy in Las Vegas - for details about the conference check out http://www.citrixsynergy.com/. I attended several sessions there inlcuding the keynotes, spoke to interesting people and had some conversations with vendors. In summary I was able to identify the following Synergy highlights:

• Introduction of a Citrix cloud strategy in combination with Amazon EC2
• XenClient, the upcoming free client hypervisor (aka project “Independence”)
• Receiver for iPhone
• Dazzle, a free tool for application self-assignment
• Virtual NetScaler appliance
• HDX multimedia acceleration

Even though these are great topics, they are either very visionary or around free tools. I was asking myself what messages partners or customers would take away from this event, in terms of what they should be doing during the next six to twelve months - and I must admit that I didn’t get a real answer to this question. In particular, I had the feeling that XenApp as the commercially most relevant product did not get the attention it deserved. In other words, Citrix missed to show real advances regarding XenApp manageability and present sessions about user profile management.

It looks like Citrix descided to use Synergy to primarily talk about the future and leave today’s business to their partners…

Windows Server 2008 R2 RC

These days, everybody is talking about the release candidate of Windows 7, available for download for TechNet and MSDN subscribers. However, when I downloaded the Windows 7 RC last Friday, I figured that the release candidate of Windows Server 2008 R2 is also available. Looks like Microsoft really wants to release both server and workstation editions of their upcoming Windows OS simultaneously.