At Citrix Synergy 2019, we had the privilege to hear former U.S. Secretary of State Dr. Madeleine Albright discuss leadership, government, world affairs, technology, and much more. There were so many brilliant quotes during her talk, but this one stood out to me as an alliance leader because it is applicable to what we do in Citrix Strategic Alliances every day:

“Diplomacy is people to people relations. Figure out who is helping you to solve problems. Develop partnerships, build trust, understand whom you’re dealing with.”


People-to-people relations. Figuring out who is helping you solve problems. Develop partnerships, build trust, and understand your partner. I’m almost repeating the full quote — but these are the foundations of any successful strategic alliance in our industry. We showcased many of these alliances at Synergy.

If you watched Citrix CEO David Henshall’s keynote address on Day 1, you saw our remarkable progress and momentum and the impressive list of all the product and solution deliverables since last year’s Synergy. What stood out for me in dramatic fashion is that much of this momentum is with our strategic alliance partners. Whether it’s our cloud-networking solutions on Azure, GCP and AWS, or our Workspace app support for Android, Chrome, Windows, or our Citrix Cloud Workspace appliances with Cisco and HPE, partners are providing the power behind our ecosystem of choice.

We were proud to follow up this momentum with some more great innovations with our strategic alliance partners that continue to drive the security, flexibility, and choice our customers expect from Citrix Cloud solutions.

Let’s take a look at some of the exciting announcements we made at Synergy with our key strategic alliance partners.

Microsoft

With Microsoft, Citrix continues to innovate to provide our customers with solutions that are powering the future of work. We’ve never been better aligned with Microsoft now that we’re focused on the end-to-end integration of Window10, Office 365, Intune, and Azure. At Synergy, we showcased the following key innovations with Microsoft:

You can read the full update on Citrix and Microsoft from PJ Hough, our Chief Product Officer (below right, with Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft 365).

Google

We were also delighted to have Rob Enslin, President of Google Cloud, join David Henshall on stage and update us on the remarkable progress and breadth of solutions available now from Citrix and Google. Among our significant announcements in partnership with Google were:

  • Citrix Workspace for Google Cloud, which included integration with Google ID
  • Citrix MCS on GCP (customers can request access today, with GA coming in July)
  • Citrix SD-WAN and ADC for GCP (also in the Google Cloud Platform Marketplace)
  • Linux Virtual Delivery Agent (VDA) support for GCP

We even featured an excellent customer case study of energy company — Neste — that has implemented a unified work experience with Citrix and Google. You can see our Google announcements from Synergy here.

However, we didn’t stop with Google and Microsoft. Again, think back to Dr Albright’s quote — “figure out who is going to help you solve problems.” Our customers have many challenges (or opportunities) when building their future digital work environment, so we must always be looking to develop our ecosystem to support them. With that in mind, we also announced these great solutions at Synergy:

I also want to thank our strategic alliance partners who showcased our joint alliance solutions and were key Synergy sponsors — Microsoft, Google Cloud, Chrome Enterprise, Samsung, Cisco, HPE, and AWS.

These are all fantastic solutions, and great alliances. However, I get back to the people-to-people relations. None of this innovation happens without the hard work of and strong personal relationships between Citrix and our strategic alliance partners. I want to thank my team, our extended Citrix teams, and our strategic alliance partners for those strong relationships and for the continued success of our alliances.

I’ll leave you with one last thought from Dr Albright: “We’re all problem-solvers in one way or another, but its rare that someone can solve problems on their own.”

Indeed.