by
Brian Madden
This is the first US iForum not being held at Disneyworld in Florida. Las Vegas is a fun town, although kind of a dangerous place for computer nerds. I checked into the Mandalay Bay hotel in time to catch the 2:00 Makunouchi Rikishi Grand Sumo Championship Tournament. They’re competing for the title of Yokozuna (the grand champion of sumo). That tournament ended (and the crowds poured out) right as Citrix iForum registration was opening. Seven Citrix nerds are still MIA.
Flipping through my conference guide, I realized this show has really taken on a life of its own. Gone are the simple days of two conference tracks (“technical” and “business”). Now we have three tracks that are called (and I am not making this up): “Fuel Business Efficiency and Growth with On-Demand Access,” “Drive Individual and Corporate Productivity with an Access Platform,” and “Run a more Secure IT Environment with a Platform Approach to Access.” (Seriously, whoever came up with these track names needs to be donkey-punched.)
Despite the names, the content of the tracks looks pretty good. There are a lot of technical sessions on the agenda. The Citrix product groups are also hosting a tech lab where they will show off their newest stuff. There are three of us attending the show this year (Shane Broomhall, Emily Monaco, and me), so we’ll be able to attend all of the sessions we want and share the interesting nuggets with you. (I’m most interested in the 64-bit and Citrix futures sessions.)
Speaking of the agenda, someone at iForum HQ had a legitimately great idea and decided not to schedule a keynote session for day two. The day two keynote was typically attended by about 6 out of 2000 people in previous years, and that’s just because Pleasure Island closes at two. Since the real fun in Vegas doesn’t even begin until later than that, the schedulers decided it would be best not to have an empty room for the technical keynote. (Although with Kruger out of the picture they didn’t really need to worry anymore.)
So what do we have to look forward to at this year’s show?
- Citrix will really be focusing on the networking side of things and getting a lot of information about there about the new NetScaler stuff. I think we’ll hear some announcements about bringing some of that functionality into the lower-end Citrix Access Gateway hardware.
- It appears that Citrix is also cooking something up in the end-to-end application management space. (Like Altiris? Softricity? I’ll be digging for more this week.)
And finally, I’ll be running around with my microphone and field recorder talking to smart people about what they think about the show. I’ll put those together for a special Brian Madden Live podcast next week.
(Note: You must be logged in to post a comment.)
If you log in and nothing happens, delete your cookies from BrianMadden.com and try again. Sorry about that, but we had to make a one-time change to the cookie path when we migrated web servers.