I’m at the Citrix Synergy conference this week where they are now focused heavily on the employee experience via their new Citrix Workspace platform that brings all enterprise apps from Workday to Service now into a single dashboard.

The goal according to CEO David Henshall is to give employees back 1 day per week in productivity.

The company featured a Workday integration heavily in the opening keynote. One example showed a user requesting PTO time from the platform without having to go into Workday.

Henshall added that employees don’t really have the tools to be productive at work, either in the office or virtually.

“Employee disengagement is a worldwide epidemic…they don’t have the tools to do their best work.” Citrix Chief @DavidJHenshall #CitrixSynergy pic.twitter.com/fHxdpWD6Ru

— Tim Minahan (@tminahan) May 21, 2019

A few takeaways from the keynote address include some interesting stats;

• Employee disengagement cost companies $7 trillion dollars per year.
• The average enterprise company has to manage 500 applications in house.

“Employees are the consumers of the workspace” added Henshall. Citrix is clearly reframing itself as a platform for work focused on the employee experience.

Here’s some audio from the keynote. Note how their CEO talks about talent and recruiting as it relates to their new platform.

It is my first trip to a conference of this kind so I will be curious to learn more about the future of the workspace and especially how it will help companies manage virtual employees.

Adam Armstrong from StorageReview has a good article on the product as well.

In his piece Armstrong says, “Over the last decade and more specifically the last few years, the concept of work has changed drastically. Where it was once common to go into the office and sit at an assigned desk or office and use the same hardware day after day, now employees can work from almost anywhere they happen to be. Not only that, they can work from a home desktop, work mobile through a laptop or tablet, or use any thin client they can sign into. Citrix Workspace App took this concept a long way.”

Read their full press release.

Reporters Notebook: I’ve been to over 100 conferences in my career and I can say that Citrix really knows how to run a conference. Their PR firm created a personalized itinerary for me, set up a number of interviews with key execs and treated the press/influencer contingent to their own private events. The itinerary really helped me maximize my time while on site. Their comms team checked in with me each day to make sure all my questions were answered.

Well done Citrix, well done.