Yesterday’s Vision Keynote was a great kickoff to Summit. But I’ll admit that I was really looking forward to today’s Tech Talks keynote: the pace of innovation in our product groups is breathtaking, and to see all of their hard work on stage to inspire our partners and sales teams was a great way to start the second day of Summit.

Senior VP of Engineering Jeroen van Rotterdam and senior VP of Product PJ Hough introduced Calvin Hsu, vice president of product marketing, first. As @dancote said, “Just like Citrix, @CloudAppCal makes the complex stuff very simple.” Calvin demoed new capabilities of HDX, which are unlike anything you’ve seen before. “It’s adaptive, and it’s getting intelligent about the way it delivers content,” he said.

Calvin discussed how the new HCI Workspace appliance developed with HP — a state-of-the-art solution for mid-market companies who have been struggling to deploy cloud solutions —offers a great solution for partners looking to offer their customers simplicity and reliability. He also previewed new Citrix services for Azure — XenApp Essentials, XenMobile Essentials and XenDesktop Essentials— that offer new opportunities to win with cloud. If you haven’t seen the demo of Smart Scale, part of the new Smart Tools for XenApp and XenDesktop, check it out at the Solutions Demo Sandbox. It’s like a Nest thermostat for your environment.

Next, Greg Lissy, VP enterprise product management for ShareFile, walked through the comprehensive security features of this born-in-the-cloud service, and talked about the industry trends that are opening major new opportunities for partners. Greg demoed the new ShareFile document workflows, which enable productivity across all data sources and support the reasons your customers are sharing files in the first place.

Next on stage, Ash Chowdappa, VP and GM of NetScaler ADC, explained how massive changes in our industry led to perfect conditions for our differentiators and set NetScaler SD-WAN and NetScaler MAS completely apart from the competition. Partners were impressed:

Finally, technical fellow Abhishek Chauhan always delights the audience and today was no exception, with his on-stage delivery of a NetScaler appliance—by drone.

Abhishek also demoed NetScaler’s zero-touch deployment service — now your customers can say goodbye to their branch firewalls, optimization boxes and branch routers. It was an exciting finale to some incredible new technology that you can read more about on the Citrix blogs. Just remember to never ask Abhishek for a puppy. 🙂

Hot Sessions

These were today’s most popular breakouts; if you missed any of them, they’ll be available on demand in Citrix SalesIQ beginning February 6:

  • SELL216: The comprehensive NetScaler security session
  • SELL208: Overview of ADC use cases for displacing F5 with NetScaler
  • TECH315: Designing and deploying Citrix on Azure
  • TECH205: NetScaler SD-WAN: what’s new and what’s next
  • TECH405: A deep dive on NetScaler Management and Analytics System (MAS)

Be sure to add tomorrow’s top sessions to your agenda:

  • TECH303: Deep dive into the newest enterprise application deployments with NetScaler
  • TECH305: How PVS integrated with XenServer enhances XenDesktop deployments, making VDI cheaper and simpler
  • SELL201: Consolidate every remote access solution with NetScaler Unified Gateway
  • TECH203: How to stop VMware from eating your lunch: the technical compete session

The Citrix Booth Experience

After this morning’s amazing keynote, you’ll want to get over to The Citrix Booth Experience to check out the 16 demo stations and spend some time talking about your customer challenges with field and product engineers. While you’re at the booth, get to know the channel teams at the Ask the Experts Bar, and check out Wednesday’s Geek Speak @ Summit Theater sessions on Citrix Workspace IoT and winning ShareFile deals.

Are you playing SalesQuest!, the Summit Mobile game? You could be earning game badges and points toward a DIY Demo Kit—or a free trip to Summit 2018—as you navigate through the booth and around Summit.  We’re also giving away cool electronic prizes, so get the app and play!

Looking Ahead: Diversity in Technology and Partner Appreciation Party

In just a few minutes, I’m heading over to Platinum Ballroom Salon 6 at the Marriott to hear Professor Jerry Kang’s talk on implicit bias, part of the special Diversity in Technology event. Professor Kang is UCLA’s first-ever vice chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, and his scientific discussion on implicit biases — attitudes and stereotypes that we are unaware of but still affect our behavior — promises to be fascinating. A few hundred of your colleagues have already signed up. I hope you can join me.

We can talk about it later at the Partner Appreciation Party: the Convention Center’s Outdoor Grand Plaza has been transformed into a street festival. There will be food trucks, dessert trucks, craft beer, local wines, fun games, great tunes from RE-MIX and airbrush tattoos—all the elements for an unforgettable night. The party starts at 7:00 p.m., rain or shine, so bring a jacket and let’s celebrate some #CitrixPartnerLove!

Partner innovation

Before you go, cast your vote for the Citrix Innovation Award for Partners winner. The deadline is 6:00 p.m., so there isn’t much time left to recognize the amazing work done by partners Envision, Fujitsu and Atea in partnership with their customers. Be sure your voice is heard and vote, either through the Summit Mobile app or online. The winner will be announced during tomorrow’s Closing Keynote, which begins at 11:00 a.m. on Level 1, Hall D.

Tomorrow’s highlights include our Closing Keynote speaker Bert Jacobs, cofounder and CEO (chief executive optimist) of lifestyle brand Life is Good. Bert has some great lessons on optimism and corporate social responsibility to share—don’t miss it. Remember to follow and post at #CitrixSummit and stay with me on Twitter: I’ll be here till the end @merisummers.

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Winning Together: Kicking Off a New Year of #CitrixPartnerLove at Summit!

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