First there was shock and awe. Then came denial, bargaining, and acceptance. And now, after several weeks of post-event follow-up activities, one question about the Citrix Synergy show keeps coming back to my mind:
How many people will we have to bring to handle the show next year?
As a member of the Citrix Ready program, LRS has been a regular attendee of the Synergy show in previous years. However, the booth traffic at this show was far beyond anything we’ve seen in the past. We brought more booth staff than ever. We had additional demo stations set up and fully staffed. Even so, some of us ended up scrambling for our personal laptops to run live software demonstrations for the people waiting in line.
With this Citrix-focused audience, we were expecting a lot of questions about our Virtual Session Printer Agent software (VSPA for short). We showed how that solution works in a XenDesktop / VDI setting as well as in XenApp environments. In many cases, this led to conversations about enterprise output management beyond the realm of Citrix printing. Though there were many niche players represented at Synergy, LRS was the only one providing a true enterprise level end-to-end offering.
As usual, our booth featured an iceberg sculpture that was hand-carved every day. This year, the first night of the show featured an after-hours event with an ice luge — a very popular attraction that, luckily, did not involve live product demos.
The three days of the show were somewhat stressful, at least for those of us who had to answer the questions. For customers and other attendees, we offered squeezable stress toys shaped like polar bears and penguins, along with fidget cubes to take their minds off the print problems they were trying to solve.
All in all, it was great to be able to answer so many questions over the three days and help people start to develop a print strategy for Citrix and beyond. I’m finally starting to get caught up on all the remaining customer questions… and my sleep. See you at next year’s Citrix Synergy event!