As part of VMblog's live Citrix Synergy 2016 coverage coming up later this month, we're getting our schedule ready to learn as much as we can, as quickly as we can.  Citrix Synergy is always packed with great information coming from various breakout sessions, networking sessions, keynotes and more!  But one of the places we always learn a lot is in the Solutions Expo where valuable vendors from the Citrix ecosystem setup shop to display their wares. 

But with so many vendors exhibiting at the show, how do you know who to get on your schedule? And which booths to visit?  

I was glad to hear that Lakeside Software was going to be sponsoring the event again this year.  For many years now, I've had the great pleasure of being briefed by this company and being exposed to their flagship product, SysTrack.

Lakeside Software transforms the way that enterprises deploy, manage, secure, improve, and report on end user experience by coupling the world's most lightweight agent with a robust data analysis engine to instantly grant complete visibility and control to administrators without impacting end user experience.Lakeside empowers EUC teams with comprehensive end user analytics and endpoint telemetry, enabling them to optimize user experience, mitigate risk, minimize cost, automate operational tasks, and make better decisions.  

Are you going to Synergy?  If so, I invite you to get Lakeside Software on your "must see" list.  Want to learn more?  Check out this interview to learn about what they have planned for the upcoming Citrix Synergy 2016 event.

Let's face it, it's been a wild 12 months for Citrix since last year's Synergy event.  But things appear to be taking shape quite nicely for the company, and I expect we'll get quite the education as to the direction of the company for the remainder of the year and beyond during Synergy 2016.  Things should prove quite illuminating.  But on a personal note, the one thing I will definitely miss at this year's conference will be Mark Templeton.  Not seeing and hearing him on the big stage or catching up with him 1:1 will be difficult after all these years.

But that means that conference attendees will also get their first look at the new Citrix CEO, Kirill Tatarinov.  Tatarinov, a 13 year veteran of Microsoft, where he was most recently Executive Vice President of the Microsoft Business Solutions Division, is putting the finishing touches on the company’s new plan.  Expect to hear all about it during the keynote presentations.Citrix Synergy 2016 takes place May 24-26th and this year the venue moves to fabulous Las Vegas at the Venetian and Sands Expo. Whether this is your first Citrix pilgrimage made to Synergy, or, whether you are an old pro and card carrying alumni member, I'd like to share a few tips and tricks with you to help make your coming event as smooth and as successful as possible.  I'm sure I'll miss a number of key tips or tricks, so please feel free to chime in to help others.

Let's begin! 

VMworld 2015 has come to an end, and I'm just now starting to get re-acclimated to being back in Austin, TX and the Central Time Zone.  My room at the Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco was fantastic as always; but waking up every morning at 3:30AM like clockwork was a bit much.  Thanks a lot Pacific Time Zone!

If you followed our VMworld 2015 coverage, you've already seen a number of great video interviews at various vendor booths during the show.  But stay tuned, we aren't finished yet -- more are on the way!

As part of VMblog's live VMworld 2015 coverage coming up at the end of this month, we're getting our schedule ready to learn as much as we can, as quickly as we can. But with so many vendors exhibiting at the show, how do you know who to get on your schedule and which booths to visit?

I was glad to hear that Zenoss, a company in my backyard of Austin, will again be showcasing their wares at VMworld. These guys are really fun and interesting! And they've got some really great technology in this space. Back in May of this year, I had a really good deep dive into their products since I attended the company's first ever Zenoss GalaxZ User Conference. One of the big takeaways from this user conference was how much Zenoss values its customers. And I was also exposed to the company's "Own IT" mantra.

Zenoss technology delivers a quick and precise insight into potentially affected services so you can fix the problem before your business and users are impacted. You’ll know what events are putting your critical services at risk, and you’ll have the right context and information to act faster to resolve the prioritized problems before your services are impacted. They also help you stay ahead of the curve by uncovering trends and patterns to help you optimize your IT resources and plan capacity more effectively, a critical capability required to keep your services running. And, you’ll be able to quickly scale horizontally and vertically to handle your hybrid IT environment.

Get Zenoss on your schedule, and make sure to ask them about their ZenPacks! Find out more ahead of the show by reading the below Q&A interview with the company:

As part of VMblog's live VMworld 2015 coverage coming up at the end of this month, we're getting our schedule ready to learn as much as we can, as quickly as we can.  But with so many vendors exhibiting at the show, how do you know who to get on your schedule and which booths to visit?  

This year, I'm excited to meet a new vendor to VMblog --  CloudGenix.  The company is leading the way in a very interesting segment of the market - the software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN).  The company is transforming legacy WAN's into a radically simplified, secure application-defined fabric, and virtualizing heterogeneous underlying transports into a unified hybrid WAN.  They control application performance on the network based upon application performance SLA's and business priority.  And CloudGenix ION simplifies how WANs are designed and managed, enabling customers to build Networks without Networking and achieve more than 2x the performance at less than half the cost, leading to a much faster time-to-value once deployed and extends datacenter-class security to the network edge. 

Definitely looking forward to this demo and discussion.  And you should as well.  Make sure to add CloudGenix on your schedule.  To find out more ahead of the show, check out the below Q&A interview with the company:

As part of VMblog's live VMworld 2015 coverage coming up at the end of this month, we're getting our schedule ready to learn as much as we can, as quickly as we can.  But with so many vendors exhibiting at the show, how do you know who to get on your schedule and which booths to visit?  

This year, we're excited to meet with and learn from someone new that we haven't yet met in person -- CliQr.  Founding members have a VMware background, and I've already enjoyed getting to know the company via online activity.  These guys are offering full lifecycle management delivered in a single, intuitive packaged platform.  And they enable businesses to easily and efficiently model, deploy and manage one to many applications, users, and clouds.  CliQr’s application-defined technology de-couples applications from the complexity of hybrid cloud environments, allowing them to securely move, deploy and manage new and existing application across any physical, virtual or cloud environment.

After speaking with them about this Q&A, I'm even more excited to see a demo of their product up close and personal at their booth.

As part of VMblog's live VMworld 2015 coverage coming up at the end of this month, we're getting our schedule ready to learn as much as we can, as quickly as we can.  But with so many vendors exhibiting at the show, how do you know who to get on your schedule and which booths to visit?  

This year, I'm excited to follow up with Liquidware Labs at the show.  They gave us a sneak peek at one of their soon to be released products in our video interview during Citrix Synergy.  And I can't wait to see what they are showcasing at this year's VMworld event. The company has innovative and award-winning products like Stratusphere FIT and Stratusphere UX for desktop visibility; ProfileUnity with FlexApp and FlexDisk for desktop portability; and Flex-IO which supports IOPS acceleration in non-persistent VDI environments.

We had a great conversation at Synergy, and I expect after these many months have passed since that time, we'll see some incredible updates to their offerings.  And don't forget, these guys have some serious virtualization talent working at their booth.  So make sure to come by and geek out with these guys, many of which have been around in the virtualization market long before it was cool.

As part of VMblog's live VMworld 2015 coverage coming up next month, we're getting our schedule ready to learn as much as we can, as quickly as we can.  And I know show attendees are doing the same.  With so many exhibitors, how do you know who to get on your calendar and which booths to visit?  

This year, VMblog is again making sure that Tegile is on its must see list.  Last year at VMworld, we had a great time speaking with the team at Tegile, and we got a fantastic recording out of it which we shared with readers.  And after speaking with them about this Q&A, I'm even more excited to see what they are doing this year!

As part of VMblog's live VMworld 2015 coverage coming up next month, we're getting our schedule ready to learn as much as we can, as quickly as we can.  And I know show attendees are doing the same.  With so many exhibitors, how do you know who to get on your calendar and which booths to visit?  

This year, VMblog is adding Zadara Storage to its must see list.  Last year at VMworld, we had a great conversation with the team over there, and we're excited to see what's new this year.  The company has been a pioneer provider of enterprise storage-as-a-service (STaaS), delivering high-performance, highly available and predictable (QoS) file and block storage, in a pay-as-you-go model for on-premise deployment and via global service providers.

As part of VMblog's live VMworld 2015 coverage coming up next month, we're getting our schedule ready to learn as much as we can, as quickly as we can.  And I know show attendees are doing the same.  The exhibit area is always packed with interesting vendors showing off their wares -- so how do you know who to visit?  Who do you put on your schedule with so many vendors and such little time?  Over the years, I've found it important to get a game plan setup and do so early.

This year, VMblog is adding Xangati to its must see list.  We had a great conversation with Xangati at Citrix Synergy, so we're looking forward to the follow up conversation.  If you haven't already run into them, Xangati is an infrastructure performance management and service assurance analytics provider, supporting complex virtualized data centers and hybrid cloud environments.  Organizations have leveraged Xangati to resolve end-user issues more quickly, optimize virtual applications, diagnose root causes of contention storms and assure overall infrastructure health.  Xangati's management dashboards provide a live, continuous and interactional view into the entire IT infrastructure with predictive analytics and prescriptive remediation actions.