This message was deleted.

Basically, from what I understand, is a reboot of the program. Citrix (when I was there) paid a third party to run CUGC. Sponsors paid for events, but the folks that managed the board of directors, did schedules work with the leaders were all a third party. My understanding is this is coming in house and going to be different. One thing I can say is that it needed to change now post covid. Small, local events are hardly attended. Sponsors get upset if they show up a 12 people are there and only 2 are actual buying customers vs partners, vendors, etc. Add to that Tom Krause and looking to cut costs... a change was going to happen. It will be all new (again my understanding) and maybe even a new name

...and because of this change the local groups will no longer be independant groups. If there are going be local groups after this, they will no longer be independant because Citrix is now running them, and not local community leaders. At least that's how I understand it.

@Kasper Johansen As a local leader that is my read as well , ironic thing is we just had our biggest attendance of 2023

Same here. We were planning to build on our success from this year, and planning to host a 2 day event

Obviously will wait till January but it sounds like it will Citrix managed including approval of content , does not sound very community focused

Can only see that pushing the community leaders to do like the UK and do EUC events alone and add AVD and other vendors as people seem far more interesting in learning about AVD and Amazon WorkSpaces than attending the same old dwindling CUGC groups - the exception probably the Dutch as theirs are huge and bucking trend with numbers holding up

Same here in Denmark. We had our best XL event ever in 2023

In Germany, Helge Klein and Timm Brochhaus established the Virtualization Community which is ISV agnostic. We took the concept and doing local events periodically.

How difficult is it to get sponsorship ?

For us it is quite easy to be honest.

We didn't have any issues attracting sponsors to our XL event this year

XL events are hot. lots of attendance. its the local small meetings and the new mgmt at citrix

Our events in 2023, we had 1 XL events and 2 local events, had the highest amount of attendees ever

Wrote this elsewhere but, I'll repost here. This may be more of an emotional reaction, being part of the CUGC Steering Committee for 5 years, I feel blessed to have worked with, and honestly, gotten pretty close with personnel at CUGC HQ. However, I can't say that I'm happy about the decision to drop CUGC HQ (Engage) and take the community program internal. I always felt keeping CUGC at arms length, for users by users, was an advantage that Citrix had over VMUG/VMware. Also, Ron hit the nail(s) on the(ir) head(s) re: 3rd party CUGC HQ and local meeting challenges. Having a peek behind the curtain being on the SC, it was difficult to balance planning a low attendance meeting (polling and the local virtualization community being tight knit outside of CUGC), and well just getting meetings on the calendar as a local leader.

I can understand why they would not want to pay a third party to do this, but the messaging behind it and the way it’s being done so quickly is pretty crappy. It doesn’t give anyone the opportunity to do anything with the group they spent the last several years cultivating as Citrix has cut off all access to group members. Not to mention the events currently happening and those that have been planned.

Yeah... we had an Xchange planned for Q1 in San Diego.

I was hoping to revive the Portland meetings next year

Well, if it's over, i'm glad me and the other Montreal leaders were able to do one event before curtain time 🙂