Among the bits and pieces of undocumented Citrix history that I’ve picked up from the national Citrix classes we’ve been running at Unitek over the years, I learned that Citrix really was named after the “citrus” trees in Ft. Lauderdale, where Ed Iacobucci invented Terminal Services and sold it to Microsoft. Of course Microsoft missed out on all the enterprise features that Citrix still brings to the table with its flagship product, now called “XenApp”, that runs on top of Microsoft Terminal Services.
Out here in beautiful Bay Area, California, though, it turns out people do use Citrix on citrus tree farms, and we’ve also had some students from almond tree farms, tomato sauce farms, even J. Lohr Vinyards, a wine company n southern CA. They told me that if you have grape fields and you don’t have Citrix, you can’t compete, everyone has to know what temperature which grapes are at what time in order to go pick them, and they do that via a remote application being pushed down to handheld devices in the field, and how else are you going to do that effectively and efficiently? Citrix, of course!
And it’s not just the farmers out here setting up Citrix farms. A good portion of the work out here is the healthcare field. Kaiser Permanente, the biggest non-military implementation of Citrix in the world, sent their lead architect to our CCIA class several years ago. We have also worked in depth over the years with the leads from Stanford Medical, and Sutter health. We’ve trained the team from Stora Enzo, the largest paper company in the world, IKEA, Visa, and Chevron, side by side of course with a bunch of great engineers from smaller companies we’ve never heard of (though some of those can be the most interesting examples of what Citrix can do with a shoestring budget). Everybody uses this stuff, and what I’ve found is that the engineers who make it to a national Citrix class of this caliber are usually the best of the best, which is partly why I enjoy this job so much.
The US Government, it would seem from recent history, has to be the biggest Citrix user in the world, though it’s broken up into millions of isolated implementations. At Unitek we’ve taught Citrix to the FBI, CIA, DoD, Navy, FDA, and who knows how many others. Almost every class has some kind of government client, which always adds to the security aspect of the product.
All this is what really makes Unitek’s national classes stand out from the crowd, because after 5 years of teaching here, though we offer a lot of value-add just from our own collection of insights, the biggest value-add, I believe, is you guys, eachother, because after my lectures and demonstrations, it’s the teamwork of a great class that really makes the experience.
So if you come out to one of our Citrix classes here in the Bay Area, we’re going to want to do more than just teach. After we explain the product and the “Best Practices”, we are going to want to know what you are doing with Citrix, and how you are doing it, because Citrix is a niche, and leveraging the amazing wealth of tools Citrix offers today is an art that gets better all the time.