As part of their coverage of Citrix Synergy,Virtual Strategy Magazinerecorded a video interview with Simon Crosby, the CTO of our VMD division, at Citrix Synergy. In this interview Simon talks about our virtualization products Citrix XenDesktop, XenServer and about great partners like Marathon Technologies.

Thanks to VSM for the link back to the Synergy Underground site as well.

This is a continuation of an earlier post on XenApp Platinum related video interviews from Citrix Synergy.

As part of Synergy Underground project, we interviewed many of the people in the XenApp booth in the TechLab to talk about the different features and components of Citrix XenApp Platinum.

(Each of these videos were shot and streamed live to the Underground site via a Nokia N95 cell phone. The convenience and ability to stream live video directly to the net is the trade off for the lower audio and video quality. Read this post for an explanation of the process and a video on how the live streaming worked.)

Smart Auditor for Citrix XenApp with Kiran Kulkarni

Citrix Edgesight Monitoring for XenApp with Sean Connelly

Citrix EdgeSight for Load Testing with James Millington

As part of Synergy Underground project, we interviewed many of the people in the XenApp booth in the TechLab to talk about the different features and components of Citrix XenApp Platinum.

(Each of these videos were shot and streamed live to the Underground site via a Nokia N95 cell phone. The convienience and ability to stream live video directly to the net is the trade off for the lower audio and video quality. Read this post for an explanation of the process and a video on how the live streaming worked.)

Here are three of those video interviews -

Jay Tomlin on Smart Access

David Wagner talks about the new User profile Manager Tech Preview

Victor Thu talks about Easy Call
(low audio in first half)

Many you have seen the Synergy Underground site by now. As I wrote in the post announcing Synergy Underground prior to the conference, the goal for Synergy Underground was to give those of you unable to attend an inside view into the event. I have received many questions about how the concept came into being, how we did the live video, and how many video views the site has had since the site launch last week. I put together a presentation that answers these questions.

Several of my friends have given me a lot of well deserved grief over the live interviews I shot where you can hear me do a count down at the beginning. Yes, you can hear me say "two, one" in several of the videos. I did a countdown to help the interview subject prepare for the beginning of the live video. Some people were more than a little nervous about being broadcast live on Citrix.com (very understandably) so I thought a countdown was a good idea at the time. In my defense, most of the time when I hit the stream button on the N95 there was a couple seconds delay before the connection was established and the video began to stream. Obviously, that delay was inconsistent, so on some videos you do hear me count down. I have also heard about how many times I opened a video with "Okay". The interview subjects were not the only ones being broadcast live for the first time on the internet, the guy behind the camera was new at this as well. C'est la vie. I could have spent a lot of time editing that part out of all the videos I did and reposted them, but I decided to leave them as is, warts and all.

Despite the audible count downs, the intermittent data signals and the eternity it takes to upload videos to BrightCove, this project was a lot of fun and a big success in my opinion. I hope we get the opportunity to do this again.

There are many changes at the Citrix user conference this year. The new name, Citrix Synergy, is only the most obvious difference.

iForum is now a breakout session track, and the IT 2.0 Business Symposium track, the Application Delivery track and the Geek Speak track (including Geek Speak Live! and Geek Speak BarCamp) are all new. There are more technical sessions than ever (over 90 total). There are more industry heavyweight keynote speakers than ever before, and a keynote by a Senior Vice President from the largest software company on the planet (and our most important partner).

For the first time ever, we have an opening keynote from a best selling (and controversial) author on technology and business, and a closing keynote by a very accomplished comedian and actor. Citrix Synergy is shaping up to be the most engaging, interactive, technical and relevant Citrix user conference in our history.

I recognize that many of you across the world will not be able to attend Citrix Synergy for a number of reasons (such as the rapidly increasing costs of energy and fuel). Due to constraints such as distance, time or an overwhelming work load, several of you may have not been able to come to a Citrix conference in sometime (or ever).

The members of the Community and Solutions team at Citrix would like to bring a taste of this conference directly to you. We have put together a plan to show you the face behind the name Citrix Synergy - the faces of the attendees, partners and Citrix employees who all come together to make this event happen. We want to bring you an inside (and unofficial) look at the people and events at our user conference.

Citrix Synergy Underground will bring you inside the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston during the conference. Our team (including Rich Crusco, Vishal Ganeriwala, Gus Pinto and me) will bring you instant text updates from the keynotes via Twitter. You will see numerous live video (via Qik and Mogulus TV) and recorded video interviews (via BrightCove TV). These video will be taken inside the Convention Center common areas and halls, the Exhibit floor, Tech Lab, and Geek Speak Live and Geek Speak BarCamp (no keynote or breakout videos). We plan to speak to as many customers, partners, resellers, and Citrix employees as we can at the event, and show you many of the great demos and new technology that will be unveiled. We hope to give you an inside look at the event that you have never seen before at any user conference.

Our team put together a short video to introduce themselves and the Citrix Synergy Underground site.

(Thanks to Bryon Thomas for pointing me to Qik. Thanks to Gus Pinto for putting together the web page with Microsoft Expression Engine, and Saul Gurdus and his Web Services team for hosting the site for us and providing tech support)

Our underground coverage will begin formally on Tuesday, May 20th. Tune in to http://community.citrix.com/underground to watch.

All twenty speaking slots for the first ever Geek Speak BarCamp are filled and the scheduled is locked in tight. (Read background on Geek Speak BarCamp here, here and here). This event happens on the evening of May 21st at Synergy in Houston (in room 360 right after Geek Speak Live).

I have communicated to all the speakers the schedule, and this is now the final one I will post before Citrix Synergy. We have had a few changes (including one speaker dropping due to another commitment) but we have twenty full sessions.

The line up now includes FOUR Citrix Technology Specialists, four consultants, two Escalation Tech Support Engineers, four Product Managers, a HP Print Driver Developer and a Senior Architect from a large healthcare company.

If you have not yet registered for Citrix Synergy, you can click here to to complete your registration. I look forward to seeing you at Synergy and the Geek Speak BarCamp.

The voting is now open for this years Citrix Innovation Award -

The Citrix Innovation Award is for Citrix customers who innovate in utilizing technology to make a significant impact on their business. Ultimately, information technology is about delivering applications to end users so they can perform business transactions. These three nominees have innovated in their use of Citrix technology to cut costs, reduce time to revenue for projects, and to mitigate risk.

Here is the video from Betchel Corporation -

Next up is Cocamar Cooperativa Agroindustrial-

And finally the video for Mutual of Omaha (yes, the Wild Kingdom guys for those who remember that show) -

The judges for this years Citrix Innovation Award are listed below -

How to Vote
You can vote now for the Citrix Innovation award online at http://www.citrix.com/innovationaward. The winner will be named during the keynote session at Citrix Synergy 2008 on Wednesday, May 21st. Citrix Synergy will be held on May 20th to May 23rd at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston.

If you have not yet registered for Citrix Synergy, you can click here to to complete your registration. I look forward to seeing you at Synergy..

In my previous post on Geek Speak Bar Camp (May 21st at Citrix Synergy), we had fourteen of the twenty speaking slots filled. As of now, all twenty speaking slots for the first ever Geek Speak BarCamp are filled. (Read background on Geek Speak BarCamp here, here and here).

 
The line up now includes three Citrix Technology Specialists, four consultants, two Escalation Tech Support Engineers, a VDI Specialist from VMWare, four Product Managers, an HP Print Driver Developer and a Senior Architect from a large healthcare company.

I am looking forward to flying to Houston and getting this event started. I think that after seeing this line up and the list of technical sessions in the other tracks, I think you will agree with Shawn Bass when he wrote -

I am still working on juggling the time schedule to meet everyones equipment requirements and time constraints. I expect to finalize by Monday or Tuesday.

If you have not yet registered for Citrix Synergy, you can click here to to complete your registration. I look forward to seeing you at Synergy and the Geek Speak BarCamp.

One of the many great speakers at Geek Speak Live! (see James Rabey's post for the lineup) is Russ Daniels, HP CTO for Cloud Services Strategy. Russ Daniels was previously the CTO for HP Software, before moving into this new role last year.

In 2006, Infoworld named Russ Daniels a part of its Infoworld CTO 25.

According to his bio, "Daniels speaks widely at conferences and works closely with key HP partners and its largest and most demanding enterprise customers. Daniels has more than 25 years of industry experience specializing in software architecture, enterprise management, and software development methodologies. Prior to joining HP, he spent 15 years at Apple Computer. He has a bachelor's degree from Ohio University."

Daniels is a highly sought after speaker at technology conferences. Russ Daniels participated in a "fireside chat" at Mobile 2.0 in San Francisco last year. You can read the transcript here. He also participated in MIT's CIO Symposium in 2006 in a discussion of Software as a service. You can listen to a podcast of this discussion here

If you have not yet registered for Citrix Synergy, you can click here to to complete your registration. I look forward to seeing you at Synergy and Geek Speak Live!.

We now have fourteen of the twenty sessions at the Geek Speak BarCamp filled (read background on Geek Speak BarCamp here, here and here).

I have put together a tentative schedule of the sessions we have to date. The sessions, title, and schedule could still change, but the overall schedule is coming together.

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We are still working to fill the final six slots. Please submit your session topic now. You can use the comments in this thread, or you can email me at citrixblogger @citrix.com . You can also IM questions to citrixblogger on MSN, Yahoo and Google Talk.

If you have not yet registered for Synergy, you can click here to to complete your registration. I look forward to seeing you at Synergy and the Geek Speak BarCamp.

I am sure you all must have heard about the GeekSpeak Live event during synergy. Barry Flanagan and I are also doing GeekSpeak BarCamp on Wednesday May, 21st.

The goal for this is to give the technical audience at Synergy a chance to get together to discuss technical content most interests you. No marketing slides, no features and benefits, just hard core technical discussions about any IT topic that interests you and the attendees. You can run a white board discussion, present a technical presentation on your latest project, or show a demo of your newest creation with an SDK. Anyone can sign up for a slot. You may be an IT admin, a technology consultant, a Citrix technical employee, a technical employee of a Citrix partner (or competitor), or a student who loves technology and wants to share it.

We have 12 slots filled up so far. Read Barry's Blogs for more info here and here.

If you want to sign up then please comment on my blog or go directly to the GeekSpeak BarCamp page or comment on this blog.

Are you planning to attend the GeekSpeak Live and the GeekSpeak BarCamp?	Choose
Won't miss it for anything. Looking forward to meet all the geeks
No. I will miss all the fun

We now have twelve of the twenty sessions at the Geek Speak BarCamp filled (read background on Geek Speak BarCamp here, here and here).

1. Virtualization Defined - Joe Shonk

2. The Stress of IT - Jim Kenzig

3. Virtualization Oriented Architecture over VDI - Jaymes Davis

4. What is High Availability - Michael Bilancieri

5. Ultra Mobile Gadget Tech - Adam Marano

6. HP Print Drivers in a Citrix Environment - Robert Tuft

7. Citrix WorkFlow Studio Examples - Vishal Ganeriwala

8. Fifteen Years with Citrix - Steve Greenberg

9. Web Interface Internals - Jason Conger

10. Provisioning Best Practices - Pete Downing

11. Performance Matters on the Edge - Tim Mackey

12. Server Virtualization Best Practices - Peter Blum

Geek Speak BarCamp has twelve tech sessions so far to go along with the nine industry experts speaking at GeekSpeak Live. There is also the long list of technical sessions in the iForum and Application Delivery tracks.

We are still working to fill the final eight slots. Please submit your session topic now. You can use the comments in this thread, or you can email me at citrixblogger @citrix.com . You can also IM questions to citrixblogger on MSN, Yahoo and Google Talk.

If you have not yet registered for Synergy, you can click here to to complete your registration. I look forward to seeing you at Synergy and the Geek Speak BarCamp.

I have written previously on the great lineup keynote speakers for Synergy that includes best selling technology author Nicholas Carr, the versatile comedian Dana Carvey and the Senior Vice President from Microsoft Bob Muglia, along with an impressive line up of tech industry execs.

There is one keynote speaker I forgot to mention - Mark Templeton. Apparently he is the CEO of some software company .

Here is an video invite to Citrix Synergy from Mark Templeton, CEO of Citrix.

You can click here to register for Citrix Synergy.

The lineup of technical session content as part of the Citrix Synergy conference in Houston is starting to come together. If you are a technical person looking to put together a business justification for your trip to Synergy, this post should help.

Below is the technical breakout session lineup for Synergy

On top of these 65 technical breakout sessions, there will be nine discussion sessions in GeekSpeak Live with session leaders including Citrix Technology Professionals like Doug Brown, Rick Dehlinger, Shawn Bass, and Jason Conger.
If that isn't enough, the Chief Software Architect from Citrix, Brad Petersen, popular virtualization blogger Tarry Singh, an HP CTO and a high level technical speaker from Intel will join us as well.

Pile on 20 more community led technical sessions as part of the GeekSpeak BarCamp(and you can still sign up to lead your own session at GeekSpeak BarCamp). That all adds up to 94 technical sessions at Synergy. This should go a long way towards helping you justify attending this year's event.

On top of all this technical content, there will be an IT 2.0 Business Symposium and multiple business sessions in the Application Delivery track. When combined with the industry heavyweight keynote speakers this should be the best Citrix conference yet.

You can click here to register for Citrix Synergy. I look forward to seeing you in Houston.

Citrix and Marathon Technologies announced today an expanded partnership to more tightly integrate Marathon's everRun solution with Citrix XenServer .

the press release

I have been impressed with Marathon's solution for quite a while, and have blogged about it several times. The most recent post included several links to YouTube video demos of both their XenServer solution and their XenApp solution. Read it here. You can read my interview with Jerry Melnick, the CTO of Marathon technologies, here.

Marathon Technologies is a sponsor of Citrix Synergy, so you will be able to see this solution in person at the event. Click here to register for Citrix Synergy.

One of the new tracks at Citrix Synergy this year is Geek Speak. James Rabey blogged recently about the format of GeekSpeak Live at Synergy. A second part of the Geek Speak track is GeekSpeak BarCamp. I have blogged about this event at Synergy here and here.

This event is designed to allow any attendee to sign up to speak for 30 minutes on any technical topic. Geek Speak BarCamp will give the attendees at Citrix Synergy a new opportunity to contribute to the discussion and provide a much wider array of technical content. Pizza and drinks will be provided for those who attend. The Geek Speak Gadget Gear Lounge will be open during both Geek Speak Live! and the BarCamp as well.

This BarCamp event will follow immediately after Geek Speak Live on Wednesday, May 21st. We will have access to four sections of the Geek Speak room to host these sessions. Two of the rooms will have large LCD's screen (if you would like to show something from your laptop) and two of the rooms will be white board only. The only rules are no sales and marketing pitches or feature and benefits.

We are now taking submissions for topics. We have four speaking areas and five thirty minute blocks, for a total of twenty sessions. We have confirmed a few sessions speakers already, including Joe Shonk,Jim Kenzig and Jaymes Davis
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Please submit your session topic now. You can use the comments in this thread, or you can email me at citrixblogger @citrix.com . You can also IM questions to citrixblogger on MSN, Yahoo and Google Talk.

If you have not yet registered for Synergy, you can click here to to complete your registration. I look forward to seeing you at Synergy and the Geek Speak BarCamp.

The heavy hitters in technology are lining up to join the conversation at Citrix Synergy. You already heard about the best selling technology author Nicholas Carr, the versatile comedian Dana Carvey and the Senior Vice President from Microsoft Bob Muglia. The line up of intriguing keynote speakers does not stop there.

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Vishal Sikka Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
SAP

Scott Farrand Vice-President, ISS Software
HP

Roberto Moctezuma Vice President and GM, Desktop Solutions Global Business Unit
HP

Patrick P. Gelsinger Vice President and Co-General Manager, Digital Enterprise Group
INTEL Corporation

David Booth, President, Sales and Marketing
CSC
\

George Kurian VP/GM, Application Delivery Business
Cisco Systems, Inc.

The keynote lineup includes the CTO of SAP, a Senior Vice President of Microsoft, TWO VP's from HP, a VP from Intel, a VP from Cisco, a President from CSC AND a best selling IT author and a great comedian. This promises to be the best lineup of keynote speakers we have ever had at a Citrix event.

You can click here to register for Citrix Synergy. I look forward to seeing you in Houston next month.

Bob Muglia and Nicholas Carr are not the only headliners at Citrix Synergy this year. Dana Carveywill provide the entertainment on the final night.

(Pictures from DanaCarvey.net)

Dana Carvey is most well known for his work on Saturday Night Live and Wayne's World. After a botched open heart surgery in the late 90's, Carvey took some time off from his career and started a family.
Here are some great clips I found of Carvey on the web.

Garth Algar Highlights from Wayne's World

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You can find many more Dana Carvey videos on YouTube
. Some language on these videos is not safe for work or children.

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The SNL site on NBC.com has archives of some of Dana Carvey skits, including the hilarious "Hans and Franz".

SNL Videos - Dana Carvey
 

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You can click here to register for Citrix Synergy. I look forward to seeing many of you in Houston.

In an earlier post, I covered some of the background on one of the keynote speakers at Citrix Synergy, Nicholas Carr. Another major keynote speaker at Citrix Synergy is Bob Muglia, Senior Vice Preseident of Server and Tools Business at Microsoft.

Here is a bit about Bob Muglia from his official Bio on Microsoft.com -

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Here is a link to an interview I found with Bob Muglia on Technet Edge. In this interview, Bob admits to having NINE servers at his house.
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VP by Day - IT Pro by Night
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Steven Bink posted an interview with Bob Muglia last month on his site. Here are a few snippets -

Last year Bob Muglia did a video with Citrix in regards to the Windows 2008 Launch and our aquisistion of XenSource.

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(If you cannot see the video embedded, follow this link_._)

If you would like to see past examples of Bob Muglia keynote sessions, the Microsoft TechNet Spotlight site has three for you to watch
.

You can click here to register for Citrix Synergy. We look forward to seeing you in Houston.

One of the most intriguing keynote speakers at Citrix Synergy is Nicholas Carr. Carr became very well know in 2003 for his article "IT Doesn't Matter".

DOES IT MATTER?

Nicholas Carr poses this question in his 2004 book "Does IT Matter" , a follow up to his very controversial 2003 Harvard Business Review article - "IT Doesn't Matter". In this very controversial article and book, Carr argues that technology itself does not give you a competitive advantage and that IT should focus on risk management and cost management. Carr does admits in interviews that failure to keep up in the use of technology can put a company at a significant competitive disadvantage.

Carr's original article created alot of controversy within the IT industry. He has posted a thorough article that links to those who agree and strongly disagree with his thoughts on his website. You can find links to both sides of the discussion on this page. You can find an interview he did with ZDNet on this controversy below -

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(If you cannot view the video, you can see it at ZDnet's website)

Carr's most recent book is called "The Big Switch:Rewiring the World from Edison to Google". Carr's description of
"The Big Switch" is below -

Here is a short video interview Carr recently did for the Search Engine Strategies conference (in London) on this new book -

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Carr blogs about these topics and many more at is personal blog site - The Rough Type.
Finally, Carr created a short little video regarding his keynote at Citrix Synergy.

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Nicholas Carr provides a unique insight in the current state and future of IT. You can hear more from Nicholas Carr at Synergy.

I will be posting about other keynote speakers and sessions speakers later.

You can click here to register for Citrix Synergy.