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…
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…
The recent assault on Yahoo resulted in the compromise of almost 450,000 passwords (more here). Big firm hacks like this are becoming the rule, not the exception nowadays. According to the Identity Theft Resource Center, there were 189 known breaches from January of this year through the beginning of June. These security breaches have exposed over 13 million personal records (passwords, personal profiles, financial and credit info etc…). Here’s another reason to raise an eyebrow at the alleged Panacea that our industry’s hype machine makes of all things “cloud”.
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Last week our team put together another great Weapons Grade Exec event at the Royal York hotel in Toronto. This was our biggest ETE yet: over 25 client execs, Jason, myself, and 6 senior reps from our strategic partner community: Citrix, Microsoft, VMware, Dell, Cisco, and HP. Plenty of other IT firms hold executive targeted events: they pick a product or solution that they want to sell, they invite a senior exec from the relevant vendor to deliver a high-level sales presentation, and they wine and dine a bunch of “C-level” customer reps … hoping to close a few big deals because they have a captive audience of “decision makers.” We like to do things differently … especially when it comes to our events. I think explaining that difference is worth while.
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It’s always a remarkable feeling when you realize that a prediction you made has come true. Even better when that translates into business success.
Happily, part of my work involves watching for industry patterns and trends that affect our clients and ensuring those things remain on our collective radar. I spend time with them trying to understand and help them articulate their pain-points and organizational/IT goals. We have a great feedback-loop happening in our ecosystem: as client business needs evolve in response to social and economic forces, the IT Weapons solution offerings have to stay in step and keep the clients safe. Read more…
