The Message
We had a dozen Wepz and 10 clients in Anaheim last week for the annual Citrix Synergy conference. The guiding theme for all their solution development and strategy is now “Going Mobile”. The integration and presentation of all their products as a unified set of solutions to mobilize the enterprise is a fantastic turn in their evolution. And a natural one for Citrix. Given the product releases they announced and the demos they put on, they’ve obviously put a ton of investment into their mobile access technology, the SaaS GoTo product family, and especially my favourite: ShareFile. It’s one thing to see the carefully crafted and rehearsed product demos on a stage … Those are always impressive, and sometimes 6-12 months away from being Weapons Grade enough for us to roll out to clients. However, to actually see the stuff in action with IT professionals around the conference was pretty cool. Read more…
Here’s a slight dramatization of the most rewarding meeting I’ve had in a long time.
The client has 120 people with a small IT team and they are set grow this year with a Calgary acquisition. In the meeting was IT Director Peter, CFO Steve, and the owner/CEO James. I love seeing business owners take an interest in IT, but I feel bad when they get inundated with techno-talk; losing sight of the business forest through the IT trees. Shady sales people like to exploit these situations, I like to help prevent them.
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Citrix has some cool messaging around the idea of mobile workstyles and workshifting. Like most cool ideas … they aren’t really new, but Citrix has done a great job showing how the trends toward mobility and a decentralized workforce are shaping the future of IT. Recently, Jay & I met up with Mark Templeton, Citrix CEO, at their head office in Florida. We traveled down for a Platinum Partner business update and see his vision for Mobile Workstyles. Why the Cafeteria? They have a Genius Bar set up there. Mark’s long been one of our most important mentors, so this was a treat. Read more…
Another cruel lesson in the realities of multi-national cloud computing platforms. Did you hear that Microsoft’s Azure storage cloud fell down last week because of a school-boy error? Someone in Redmond Washington forgot to renew an SSL certificate and that took down the whole show. Every sub-region using the platform was reporting outages and degradation of service because of this issue. Mistakes happen. We are only human. But, shouldn’t you be able to trust the big guys to have the right infrastructure in place to prevent amateur mistakes like letting an SSL certifcate expire? Read more…
Free gifts, free offers, free services. These things might be attractive for food sales and consumer goods, but I honestly think it’s insulting to the clients in our industry. Nothing is really free. Organizations offering “free” stuff really just move the cost of whatever they are allegedly “giving” you over to something else and roll that up into the pricing for some bigger or more critical thing they want you to buy. I’d rather someone show me up front the value I’m going to get for the investments I make, they can keep their “free.” Read more…
