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As the current year comes to an end and as always, Last Christmas by Wham! is blasting through the speakers everywhere (for a song that was released in 1986, it has been streamed more than 1.9 billion times on the audio streaming platform Spotify, you know we like data), and as always we do our customary end of year review.
2023 is an active and tumultuous year in the EUC space. There will be many articles reflecting on a year, but a couple of main events were the refocus of Citrix after the acquisition, Frame sold to Dizzion, and very recently, the purchase closure of Broadcom and VMware, where the EUC division will be branched off. These events are testament that the EUC space is undergoing significant changes.
The changes in events
At GO-EUC, we’ve also watched the EUC event space change, where some of the Citrix-focused events have changed and transformed into more broadly focused EUC events. Two big ones that come to mind are the EUC Forum and the CUGTech in Norway. This year we were delighted to have been able to present at both events.
The UK AVD User Group and UK Citrix User Group both focused on specific areas of EUC and merged into the now-called EUC Forum.
CUGTech has transformed itself into EUCtech, focussing on a broader EUC space.
Only a couple of weeks ago, the CUGC community was announced to be transformed, and Citrix took the reins over from an external party.
Is change bad? No, not at all in these cases, quite the opposite actually. I see this as an opportunity. EUC is more than ‘just’ about one or two vendors, and while EUC stands for End User Computing, it could just as well stand for End User Community (see what I did there?)
Changes at GO-EUC
Speaking of changes, our platform also went through some changes too. Most visually noticeable, we’ve adopted a newer, more modern look and feel for our website (all credits for this go to Ryan). Secondly, and perhaps somewhat less positively, we did some restructuring, and without sounding like an evil CEO, that also meant that we had to let some of our members go. GO-EUC can only thrive by the amount (and quality) of the content that we produce; it’s the only way we can stay relevant. We’ve seen our visitors dwindling over the last year, and that data seems to correlate with the amount of content we have been producing these last few years.
Letting our previous members go wasn’t an easy or a nice decision to make, mind you. We debated long and hard about this decision and looking back, I’m still not sure if it was the right decision on all accounts. All of the past members are very smart, knowledgeable and very skilled individuals and we made this decision without any prejudice.
Ending the year, we’d like to thank the current but also the past members for their help, involvement, and past commitment to GO-EUC.
Peronal review of Eltjo
As opposed to the previous end-of-year posts that we’ve done at GO-EUC, I’d like to make this one a little bit more personal for me, Eltjo.
As most of you might know, I stepped out of my comfort zone this year and made a career change from consulting to product management at a large vendor halfway through the year. The question I was asked most in the community was how that would affect GO-EUC. Confident as always, I always replied: “We’ll just have to wait and see”.
Change is not bad, change is the best way to grow (beard).
Now, the biggest misconception is the notion that working for a vendor when it comes to community work is the sword of Damocles of conflicts of interest. I’m confident that this proverbial will prove to be nothing more than an anecdote
This perceived notion that serving a large vendor while actively participating in the EUC community is a precarious balance, is a misconception. My conception is that instead of a conflict of interest, this dual role is more like a symbiotic relationship that can benefit both the vendor and the community. Working closely with a leading vendor like Citrix provides unique insights into cutting-edge technologies and industry trends, which, when shared with the community, can help innovation and act like a catalyst for knowledge exchange. Futhermore, active community engagement keeps vendor representatives grounded in real-world challenges and user experiences, driving more user-centric product development. This two-way exchange of ideas and experiences can only enhance the EUC space as a whole and this can ultimately result in better and more user-friendly solutions. So rather than a balance, this is a partnership that advantageous to both the vendor and the community
That being said, my involvement with GO-EUC has been less to some extent, but we’ve managed to do quite a few community events this year.
My personal favorite post this year was the Measuring latency with Adafruit QT Py post, where I got to get my geek on completely and design and build a custom latency tester from scratch. As a testament to that I decided to make the code completely open source.
My favorite event was a combination of the CUGTech in Norway and the E2EVC in Rome. Our User Experience sessions there rocked, and when I say that, I mean we really, really aced it.
Peronal review of Ryan
Now, from my perspective (Ryan), 2023 is my first full year as an independent freelancer, where finding the balance between opportunities, existing customers, and GO-EUC is a challenge. For me personally, the focus was primarily on getting exposure by presenting at events rather than producing new content.
The most exciting thing on the website was, for me, the NVIDIA LDAT series. The use of physical measuring devices gave GO-EUC the tool to close the cap of measuring true User experience. With the build your own, Eltjo gave the community a viable alternative to have the same methodology, which is a nice community contribution.
In regards to Infrastructure as Code, this year was all about the initialization of the project in your own environment. The goal is to enable everyone to use the GO-EUC project with minimal effort. Are we there? No, not yet, but we are making small steps to get to our end goal, the goto repository for all performance testing on any platform.
Whats’ next?
What does the future hold? Well, we’ll need to wait and see. We aren’t going anywhere, apart from going to events, that is!
If you celebrate the holidays, then we’d like to wish you an awesome holiday period and remember, EUC Rules!
Photo by Kenta Kikuchi on Unsplash
