by Donald Wong
For the second year in row, a Bay Area CUGC meetup was held on my birthday. Now, I believe it’s intentional and the organizers wanted to celebrate such a glorious day by inviting everyone to my party. Ok, all kidding aside, the pure coincidence of the event date sure made it challenging. However, I was able to clear out any prior commitments to attend the event. The venue was at Sino, an upscale and modern restaurant located in a popular area, Santa Row, in the heart of San Jose.
After a quick sign-in and brief meet-and-greet, Joshua Espinosa, an SE from Citrix, took the floor to give everyone a rundown on Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops and the key announcements stemming from Citrix Synergy 2019.

The next set of presenters were from Ivanti. This wasn’t a deep dive session, but it was to generally go over at a high level what Ivanti offers in their wide and deep portfolio of products and services. We all have heard of acquisitions of LandDesk and AppSense. But did you know they also have offerings on security, endpoint management, scripting, and even service desk application management with solutions such as Lumension, FrontRange, and Heat???

We next all took a break to network and socialize with our vendors, peers, organizers, and sponsors. Here’s a picture of the Citrix delegation. Citrix SEs Joshua Espinosa hanging out with Michael Neuberger. Thumbs up to a great event and thanks for being great resources to help the Citrix community. Awesome guys!

The event came to close with the always-popular drawing for various sponsored gifts and prices. Congratulations to those who were the lucky chosen ones. This was yet another successful event and meetup. The location obviously was a great spot with ample parking. In speaking with various attendees, we had a very diverse crowd from all over the Bay Area. Looking across the room during the event, I noticed many smaller pockets of engaging conversation among smaller groups throughout the night, which was an awesome sight to see. There were definitely some familiar faces among the crowd, but I also noticed individuals who might not have attended previous events.

Let’s continue to support the Bay Area CUGC efforts and to grow participation each and every outing. Here’s a thanks to all those who attended with a big thanks to our CUGC leaders Toan Thai, Shams Maghani, and Garren Quibelan on their sometimes unrecognized contributions.
Looking forward to the next event.
Donald
@Dywwong LinkedIn blog.itvce.com Citrix Technology Advocate