Citrix CEO Mark Templeton believes that IT needs to become more like consumer services and entertainment companies such as Netflix and Amazon Instant, focusing on user experience over the device or platform used to consume them.
These kinds of services 'sit in the middle aggregating and delivering services in a high qualuty way but don't own the content,' he told keynote attendees at the Citrix Synergy 2014 conference in Los Angeles this week.
'They are the ones able to deliver what we want,' said Templeton. 'We can learn a lot from these as role models – they are able to leverage services and content that is produced anywhere and allow people to enjoy it anywhere, to deliver an incredible customer experience. IT should be a workspace service provider, where services can be accessed anywhere, can work anywhere, with Citrix as the provider of apps and other services to make this all possible in a hybrid world.'
Tempeton described the new strategy as 'an acceleration on the trajectory we established many years ago, but sensitive to the velocity of change we are seeing today.'
On the 25th anniversary of the company, Citrix Synergy 2014 attendees are learning about how the company's new offerings based on its proven technology around virtualisation, mobility, networking and cloud services technologies can further enable secure delivery of apps, desktops data and services to any user, on any device, over any network or cloud.
The biggest update to its product offering announced so far has been the new Citrix Workspace Suite – a single, flexible solution that will support multiple corporate or personal devices, providing seamless access to apps, data and services across public, private or hybrid cloud environments.
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'Until now, businesses have had to rely on disparate technologies to address desktop, mobile and app infrastructure challenges,' said Steve Daheb, Citrix SVP. 'But these standalone products are no longer meeting the needs of a newly mobilised workforce.'
The Citrix Workspace Suite is available immediately and there are special half price promotions for enterprise users purchasing licenses when they trade their Horizon or View licenses for the Citrix offering.
To further cement its partnership with Google, organisations can also receive 25% off Citrix Workspace Suite licenses for use with Google Chromebooks.
As well as the new product, the company is refining its new generation of Windows virtual app and desktop products including XenApp and XenDesktop, providing high-performance HTML5 browser-based access from any device and simplifying roaming apps.
It is enhancing its ShareFile mobile file sharing suite to give businesses the ability to take back control of corporate data in personal data services, resulting in productivity and security. Together with this it is releasing ShareFile StorageZone Connectors SDK that allow any IT or partner organisation to develop connectors to any enterprise content management system, expanding the types of data users can access and edit on the go.
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Features added to its latest release of the XenMobile solution includes operational and scalability enhancements, backend integrations that further automate workflows, and new productivity apps including WorxNotes, WorxEdit and WorxDesktop. These solutions are aimed at facilitating BYOD, enabling people to be more productive on their devices while IT retains control.
In addition, it has announced major enhancements to its NetScaler MobileStream technology that improves mobile network and application performance along with network visibility, while tightening security for both the end user and the enterprise.
'We are going to go back to first principles,' explained Templeton, 'It's really about trying to connect people that have tasks to do with the apps and the data that we need to do to do them, whether carrying out a transaction or writing a document or all the things in between around collaboration and sharing. It's not about mobile first and cloud first, but experience first, in a world that is increasingly hybrid and hyper-connected. Choices are greater than they have ever been and will continue to get greater, so we need to build an infrastructure that is adaptable and flexible, application fluent, device independent and location independent.'
