I'm rather looking forward to Synergy this year; for one thing it's going to be in my own backyard in San Francisco, while I appreciate not having to travel the big draw for me is that this will be when Citrix finally formally launch XenClient. I'll cover my thoughts on XenClient in more detail in my next blog post but for now here is my summary of what to look for to next week.
First off, I need to put in a plug for two events that I'm participating in.
Chris Wolf and I will be presenting the breakout session “SYN 313 - Server-hosted Virtual Desktops: what the vendors aren't telling you”. This is a follow on to the presentation at last year's Synergy which focused on server virtualization. This time around we will be taking a close look at what we consider to be the critical requirements that a enterprise class server hosted virtual desktop platform should possess and then scoring vendor products against these requirements. SYN 313 is scheduled for 4:30 PM on Wednesday, May 12th.
Then on Thursday at 5 PM I'm participating in a Geek Speak Live! Session alongside Simon Crosby, Ian Pratt, Kurt Roemer, and Gabe Knuth where we will be discussing the client hypervisor. I'm not sure whether I should be looking forward to sitting alongside Simon or not - images of being locked in a cage with a tiger keep flashing through my mind.
Tiger baiting aside, what else is happening at Synergy?
One breakout session that I wanted to attend but can't because it clashes with my own, is Aaron Cockerill’s presentation (SYN324) on Citrix’s vision for the future of XenDesktop (thanks Aaron, I knew I could rely on you).
One session that I definitely will be attending is Michael Thomason’s session “Making Sense of desktop virtualization - what we learned” (SYN307). Michael is a Senior IT architect for Emory Healthcare, if you attended Synergy 2009 you might remember that it was Emory Healthcare that won the Citrix Innovation Award last year. I hope Michael won’t think badly of me for saying that last year he had only just scraped the surface of what was possible with XenDesktop, and I'm very interested to hear what he has learned over the last 12 months and how Emory's doctors have been getting on with XenDesktop.
I'm tempted by Rosen Sharma's session on optimizing security for VDI deployments (SYN309), but unfortunately his session clashes with the session that Sean Donahue and Orestes Melgarejo are presenting on XenApp futures (SYN306). The key item here for me is not so much learning about the new technologies that might be appearing on the XenApp roadmap, but in finding out what lies behind the cryptic bullet point “Increased integration with Microsoft and the Citrix stack”.
These sessions aside, I think that for the rest of the event you'll either find me at the XenClient sessions or at Geek Speak Live! Ignoring my own participation, Citrix have put together an outstanding lineup of sessions for Geek Speak Live! with topics covering everything from desktop power consumption to cloud security.
For me, the only bad news is that when Synergy winds down, so too will my blog. Gartner like quite a few other analyst firms has strict policies on analyst blogging, so once Synergy is over www.SimonBramfitt.com will be put on hiatus and my blogging activities will transition over to the Gartner blog site. I'll still keep a token presence here, but probably no more than status updates and notifications of new posts on the Gartner site.