Recently Citrix held it’s annual Citrix Summit for Citrix partners and consulting professionals.  While I was unable to attend this year, I was following what was going on.  I personally was particularly interested in the announcements that focused around the core products of XenApp and XenDesktop.  In this space there were several announcements worth mentioning that we can look forward too as Citrix customers and end-users.

Monitoring

First let’s discuss the announcement about the Citrix Acquisition of Comtrade.  Since the introduction of XenApp and XenDesktop 7.x products we have been looking for better ways to receive alerting about what is happening within our Citrix systems.  Director will do a good job of certain things, but for warnings that lead to alerting of critical issues this extremely important to customers.  Looking at the monitoring product market more closely SCOM is one of the most utilized products on the market today with over 50% of market.  This acquisition will allow for customers that leverage SCOM to more easily get the notifications they need to monitor their environments Citrix with success.  Here are a couple of news related announcements if you are interested in learning more about this new option available to your organization if you are leveraging Microsoft SCOM.  Citrix Announcement and Comtrade Announcement.

XenApp and XenDesktop 7.7

Right before the New Year version 7.7 of these products was released; so this wasn’t really a Summit announcement, but it was covered here as well.  Some of the great things you can look forward to in this version of the product are the reintroduction of zones (similar to what we had in XenApp 6.x products).  Zones is beneficial to complex deployments with remote sites allowing better segregation of Citrix server architecture.  Additional complements are continued enhancements with HDX insight for graphical enhancements that also improve your experience in Skype for Business, new updates to Framhawk for better connectivity resilience even on slower networks, enhancements that provide better into integration to the cloud and more.  For more detail on what you can look forward to read more here.

XenApp and XenDesktop 7.8

We can also look forward to another product update during the first quarter of this year that will provide even more enhancement to these core products.  There has been some information on what we can look forward to, but ultimately once the product is released we will share more here on 24×7 IT Connection.  In the short-term, here is a quick look.

Concluding Thoughts

All in all it appears change is in the air, and it’s all for the better.  Citrix is taking there already solid products and adding the necessary enhancements we need to move our Citrix environments into a new era of technology.