by Randy Smith, Washington DC CUGC Leader

What do you say when you’re asked if you want to be a part of a team of experts to host one of the Lunch Table Tech Chats at Citrix Synergy…You say yes. Which is what I did and then promptly felt excitement mixed with a little fear.

This is what local CTP a.k.a the Citrix Jedi and good friend of mine, Chris Rogers, posed to me.

I jumped at the opportunity and this being my first time at Synergy, it is a little hard to describe the sheer size of the event. Citrix seemingly turned a portion of Vegas into a small city of its own with the hurried feet of colleagues and of those who have just met for the first time becoming instant friends rushing off together to the next exciting session. It was then I met Laure Cetin, who organized the Lunch Tech Table Chats and is an active member of the CUGC Community, who I can’t thank enough and seems to be the best cat herder I have ever met and can solve any problem while making it look easy and effortless!

At lunch time I made my way into the main hall where I joined the other volunteers for the Lunch Table Tech Chats. It wasn’t very long before I was joined by fellow attendees and we begin to share our experiences. Along with conversations and meeting other great active members on CUGC like Dave Brett, who mentioned that Synergy focused a lot on the NetScaler this year, and it was definitely on top of everyone’s mind who joined my Network table. I enjoyed many great conversations and met some really amazing engineers. We all seemed to start off with asking each other the same question of where in each of our environments the NetScaler lived and which team managed the NetScaler…Application team or Networking team. The consensus was that neither of the groups ended up being the owners but rather a separate group needed to be created in businesses for us as Developers typically do not want anything to do with Networking and the Networking team does not want anything to do with applications.

So what I found was a unique group of people at my table whose experience was much more in depth and had a wide range of knowledge on how applications work on a Network and how to secure both sides. It seems in this unique environment we live in today there are those who focus on just one technology and do that well. However, what I found mostly in our conversations was that in most organizations that once someone discovers the ability of the NetScaler engineers, it becomes a conversation something like “Hey can the NetScaler solve this problem?” and always the answer is yes.

However, your NetScaler engineer is a true solution engineer and with the NetScaler as his or her tool there is not much that one cannot accomplish.

Thank you Citrix Synergy for this opportunity to meet so many talented people and learn so much.