European event on mobile strategies and App development  - March 7 & 8, 2001

- An impression -

The 7th and 8th of March were an inspiring two days on mobile application strategies and development. The event was held on the Westergasfabriek terrain in Amsterdam. Target audience: C-level management, consultants, developers and enthusiasts. In short a very broad audience indeed. As Daniel Erasmus, the host for the keynote speeches, put it in one slide: Development + Business = Magic

Being a consultant and app-enthusiast myself I had to divide my attention between the DevCamps, entrepreneurs present and keynote speeches.

The trend is clear: Apps are hot! If the word “app” is not present in the dictionary, it should be very soon. A comparison with the first http-wave seems valid: Everyone wants an app. Apps are becoming more and more a personal thing. Where the creation of apps can now be a very costly matter (employing developers etc.), there’s a rise in platforms that let you create apps without any programming skills. Remember the Geocities website building tools? Sure, the output wasn’t always pretty, the code was messy, but it sufficed and look where we are today: anyone can do wordpress, joomla or xoops websites…

The future looks bright for the companies that build lego-like frameworks for dummy app development. It’s time for the %your-(company)name-here% -App to hit the appstore!

I was present on invitation of the IOSDevCamp organization (Dom Sagolla) to increase the magic and take part in the jury. The idea of DevCamp is to combine ideas and developers and build applications in a two-day hackathon: Help each other , Create together and Present to the jury!

The IOS developers present blew us (the jury) away with their ideas, demo’s and prototypes. A very big thanks to all involved for creating a super productive atmosphere! And congratulations to the winners in the various categories. On the risk of not giving credit to all winners, here are a few;

• Distress – for the best prototype and demo
• Ticketeer – for a tie on the best Amsterdam App
• Joris Kluivers – community prize – for organizing IOSDevCamp avant-la-lettre and building a Dutch community

A big thanks to the Municipally of Amsterdam for sponsoring this event and setting up an Amsterdam App challenge, Getronics (my employer) for sponsoring iCE Amsterdam, the people I met for the exciting ideas and inspiration (how’s that star field coming along you guys at ChainrApp?), and last but not least Herman van Bolhuis from iCE Amsterdam for organizing the event and the IOSDevCamp organization for having me.

On the 9th and 10th of june 2009, I visited the Citrix iForum Benelux 2009:

iForum is the event where virtualisation, networking and application delivery meet.

The 9th of june offered two workshops of which I attend the one hosted by CDG: ‘Optimizing your datacenter with Citrix and Novell Platespin’. Products covered where Novell Platespin Recon and Migrate, CItrix XenApp, XenServer, XenDesktop and Provisioning Server. The workshop featured a nice package of demo’s on screen. I think a Provisioning Server brings some very nice features to the Citrix productline. The main worry of every Citrix admin (how do I keep my XenApp servers identical? ) isn’t much of a challenge anymore with provisioning server, which streams a single read-only vDisk to every XenApp server via PXE. A major downside is obviously the load on the network at boot time.

After the workshop I checked into my hotel and prepared for an interesing evening programm fully loaded with “networkiwork related consumptions… Accompanied by a live performance of the greatest rock band The Netherlands have ever produced: Golden Earring (still going strong despite of being in their sixties).  

The 10th of june was the “real” conference day; lots of workshops to choose from. With a very interesing opening keynote by Mark Templeton (CEO Citrix), introduced (in Double Dutch, quite understandable for native dutch speakers) by Rob van der Hoeven (Area Vice President Benelux). Mark Templeton presented his vision on tomorrows workspace and the direction Citrix is heading to provide solutions to the challenges of the (near) future.  Introducing Dazzle as an iTunes-like portal where enduser can “shop” their own applicationset which can also incorporate 3rd party webapplications etc. Citrix Reciever for iPhone (windows mobile coming soon) bringing the amount of citrix clients down to (the power of) 1. Futhermore, introducing XenClient: a hypervisor solution for the desktop allowing endusers to switch easily between their own private OS and the controlled environment of the corporate desktop also availble for MAC. This promises to be a very interesting product indeed, especially because of its pricing: FREE Also free of charge is the use of XenServer, which is now the preferred platform for hosting XenApp and incorporated some interesting features like XenMotion (vMotion) at no additional costs… Since results of virualized XenApp environments on other (vmware) products varied, XenServer is definately the way to go!

 My workshop program for the day:

1. Keynote: Mark Templeton, CEO & President of Citrix Systems Inc. & Rob van der Hoeven, Area Vice President Citrix Systems Benelux
2. Virtualize your XenApp: how to maximize XenApp server potential by Martijn Bosschaart
3. Meet the Experts – Ask the hard questions! by Thomas Zell, Derek Thorslund, Simon Frost, Rob Sanders and Jan-Frans Lemmens
4. LUNCH
5. Citrix Receiver: the new framework to manage your Citrix clients by Simon Frost
6. Best Practices XenApp by Rob Sanders
7. XenServer 5 – what the other virtualisation guys don’t want you to know by Peter Bats
8. Closing keynote