by Eduardo Molina, CTP, Cincinnati CUGC Leader

It is very difficult challenge to write about day 2 of Synergy after reading Esther’s post for Day 1 but I’m going to give it my best try, after all, this is my 14th consecutive Citrix Conference, I started coming when it was called iForum.

It is 7:15 am, my alarm clock a.k.a my phone goes off, it is time to get up and get ready because the Day 2 Keynote starts in less than two hours. Why did I wake up so late you might be asking? Well, yesterday was the welcome reception and we had a great evening and I didn’t go to bed at the earliest time.

Once I’m ready, I head down to the auditorium. Before I get there, I spot a coffee shop to get an iced coffee and a blueberry muffin to help me be sharp during this Keynote. Day 2 Keynotes are usually more technical, we see more demos and one of the best parts is the announcement of the Citrix Innovation Award.

It is not 8:45 am, I’m taking my seat inside the auditorium and I can see I’m not the only one that might be a little tired from last night. People are still coming in, the ones that are already in are checking email, taking pictures. In my case, I’m getting ready because I usually blog the Keynotes live. Please stop by here and check it out.

The Keynotes started promptly at 9 AM and, as we all expected, the recap of yesterday’s announcements are happening but a lot more details are being shown and the demos are just running very nicely.

It is time to announce the winner, and this year’s winner of the award goes to a Latin American company named Arca Continental. I’m extremely proud of this because I’m a Latino and it is great to see that our culture has the technical knowledge and the vision to incorporate so many different Citrix technologies into their solution.

The keynote presentations are over and it is time to go and visit the Expo hall, but I stopped by where Trond Haavarstein (@xenappblog) is sitting and as we are chatting, one of his friends that works for Citrix stops by to talk about home lab equipment or at least that is what I thought.  Three minutes into the conversation, I found myself walking towards the stage to take a tour behind the scenes to check out the equipment that was powering all the demos  that we just finished watching. To my surprise, long gone are the days where Citrix staff needed a couple racks worth of equipment, everything was running out of four 5th generation Intel NUCs.

Time to head to the Lunch Table tech chats. This was located in the lunch area and gives everyone the opportunity to sit down and talk to colleagues about common interests such as Mobility, Networking, Educational or Government Sectors. The conversation was so interesting that I completely lost track of time. It is now 1:45 pm, time to head out to check out the Citrix booth at the Expo Hall and then a few sessions.

I stopped by the Citrix Lifecycle Management booth, we had a great conversation about how using this technology, customers can automate the whole installation of a Citrix XenApp/XenDesktop environment and now with the addition of SmartScale and Updates, the customer has even more automation over their environment. Make sure you check out this project.

One of the sessions I attended was #SYN323 XenApp/XenDesktop tech update – May 2016 by Dan Feller (@djfeller). This session is actually longer than the usual session, and, as a matter of fact, is double the time of all other sessions due to the great amount of content he always presents. As I expected, the session is standing room only and the 90 minutes go pretty fast. The session was recorded so make sure you check it out.

The day is almost over but I decided to go to #GeekSpeakTonight. This session brings tons of interesting information and it has cold refreshments for the attendees. 😉 As in previous years we get to hear from three real geeks that have resolved issues in a very unique way: the winner of this year basically decoded NTLM on the NetScaler–very, very impressive. Right after that, Brian Madden takes the stage for the famous Geek Out Game Show. It was very funny and the best part is that a Cincinnati friend won the whole thing.

Time to get something for dinner, go back to my hotel room and work on my email that I have not touched all day long. Hope you enjoyed reading… See you out there!