One year as a Citrix Technology Professional (CTP)

Last year, I’ve been awarded as a Citrix Technology Professional (CTP) and I’m really proud for being renewed this year. This article will try to sum up this year.

The official description from Citrix of the program is:

“The Citrix Technology Professionals (CTP) Program provides an opportunity for participants to gain deeper insight into Citrix strategies and technologies, including advance knowledge of planned projects. Awardees engage with Citrix leaders to help shape the future of cloud computing technologies that enable mobile workstyles, providing valuable input on business needs and feedback on product strategy.”

The first weeks as a CTP are exciting as you have a lot of information to assimilate in a short period. Perrine, the CTP Community Manager, gives us all the details we need. The good thing is that it’s all about community, the “newbies” are warm-welcomed by the other members and we received a lot of “tricks” from them. More than community, the CTP is a family, the Slack private channels are used as much as for personal topics like weddings, born as for business ones. We share (almost) everything!

As I already mentioned, there is a Slack workspace dedicated for the communication between Citrix and the CTPs. This is, by far, the best benefit of being part of the family! There are almost 100 channels where you can:

• Ask questions (and have answers!)

• Talk about product enhancements, support issues

• Exchange with the Citrix Product Managers and Architects

Those Slack channels are quite busy sometimes and it can be really hard to follow them. As an exhibit here is the average number of messages per day for the past year (from Mondays to Fridays):

And if you think, weekends are quiets; here is the same stat for them:

As you can see, there is no pause during the weekends and there is a peak on May due to a Sunday with more than 2900 messages. As you may know, Citrix organizes its conference called Synergy during this period and the CTPs met each other during a “face to face” meeting with the different Citrix Product Managers and C*O. That’s a HUGE thing as you have the strategic and technical vision for the next month/years directly. It’s also really interesting because during this meeting, you met the people you are talking to everyday through virtual channels, and you can finally put a face to a nickname/avatar.

As already mentioned, it’s hard to keep updated. Just to measure how hard it’s, I’ve tried to count how much time I’m dedicating to this. Basically, I’m using my work commute time to read/answer on:

• Slack

• Social Medias

My daily commute time is around 1h30 so it’s about 7h30 per week or more than 16 days for the entire year! Sounds crazy, isn’t it? On top of that, we have some G2M (GotoMeeting) with the different Citrix teams (from the support to the product managers) where we discuss about the future of the products. This year, we had 42 of them (almost one per week!).

Today is the announcement day, and I’m really proud to be renewed as a CTP for 2018 and I’m pleased to welcome the new CTPs:

• Carsten Bruns

• Christiaan Brinkhoff

• Gareth Carson

• George Spiers

• James Rankin

• Patrick Coble

• Rory Monaghan

Can’t wait for this new exciting year and see you soon!

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