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Citrix Synergy, the conference where mobile workstyles and cloud services meet, concluded earlier this month in Barcelona, Spain, with a bang. The bi-annual industry event, held from 17-19 October, saw Citrix unveiling the next stage of its strategy to enable the mobile enterprise and deliver business-ready cloud services.
In the coming year, Citrix has set its sights on expanding its portfolio and enhancing the development of innovative solutions both through its in-house expertise and strategic partnerships.
Key highlights coming out of its mobile enterprise strategy include :
More than 3 Billion Devices On-Board and Counting
The starting point of the Citrix enterprise mobility strategy is Citrix Receiver™, the company’s universal software client. Citrix Receiver now supports more than three billion devices, including all major tablet, smartphone, laptop, Mac and PC platforms – and will add support for new Windows 8 tablets and laptops as they come on the market.
To further extend its support of new consumer-style devices, Citrix also announced a new version of Citrix XenClient™ that provides virtual desktops for the millions of new lightweight Ultrabooks™ transforming the laptop market. The combination of Citrix Receiver and XenClient offers the perfect starting point for companies looking to roll out Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs to employees in a way that’s secure, easy and proven.
Solving the Cloud Data Problem
In the absence of an easy-to-use solution from IT, employees increasingly rely on consumer cloud services that do not rely on corporate security, like Dropbox, to access documents on the go from any of their own devices, and share them with other colleagues via the cloud.
To address the ensuing security nightmare, Citrix announced the immediate availability of Citrix ShareFile™ with StorageZones. Because ShareFile supports enterprise client-side security, corporate data accessed on personal devices is encrypted, and can be remotely wiped by the business at any time if the employee leaves the company, or the device is lost or stolen.
A Single Control Point for Mobile Apps and Data
In this new Cloud era, IT infrastructure must provide a new class of service delivery capabilities that apply traditional application delivery acceleration, security and availability options to any cloud service, delivered from any cloud, to any user. NetScaler® CloudConnectors is an innovative new solution that seamlessly extends the traditional networking footprint beyond the four walls of the enterprise datacenter to points of presence all over the world, thus providing enterprises with a true end-to-end “service delivery fabric”.
It’s All about Me
Having fast and ready access to information on-the-go is essential to maintain workforce productivity. Citrix announced @WorkMail and @WorkWeb, two mobile apps in the new Citrix Me@Work mobile app suite.
The new @WorkMail is a native iOS and Android email, calendar and contacts solution. Users will be able to attach ShareFile docs to emails, save attachments back to ShareFile, open attachments and web links with @WorkWeb, and schedule meetings with GoToMeeting, all while staying inside the secure container on the mobile device.
In addition to introducing the above solutions, Citrix continues to advocate its “Path to the Cloud” strategy at Synergy Barcelona 2012, aimed at making it easier for companies to transform Windows apps and desktops into cloud services. Key highlights include :
Build
Citrix’s “Path to the Cloud” strategy is focused on making it easy for customers of any size to build true, Amazon-style clouds.
To accelerate the broad adoption of open, interoperable cloud computing, Citrix announced new support and momentum for Citrix CloudPlatform, powered by Apache CloudStack. CloudStack continues to see significant acceleration in traction in the open source world. With more than 30,000 community members, CloudStack has become one of the fastest growing and most active open source community projects of any kind in the market.
Bridge
Another key element is focused on making it easy for enterprises to connect their datacenters and private clouds to external, third-party cloud services. The centerpiece of the Citrix strategy in this area is Citrix CloudBridge™, an innovative solution that sits at the back door of corporate datacenters, giving them a secure, transparent, high-performance connection to third-party clouds.
This approach allows customers to securely tap into the elastic, self-service capacity of public clouds as a seamless and secure extension of their existing datacenter management. Citrix announced the new Citrix CloudBridge for Amazon Web Services, available in November, which will allow companies to move production workloads securely and transparently between private datacenters and the Amazon cloud.
Deliver
Regardless of whether services run in public or private clouds, delivering those services to end users on any device with the best performance, reliability, and security is essential. At Synergy Barcelona, Citrix demonstrated the next generation of its upcoming NetScaler® SDX, the company’s consolidated service delivery networking platform.
The groundbreaking NetScaler SDX platform was introduced last year to let customers run up to 40 virtual NetScaler instances on a single multi-tenant SDX hardware appliance with full isolation and independence. For the first time ever, customers will be able to unify a wide range of best-in-class L4-7 network services in a seamless application control layer to drive app intelligence into existing transport networks and emerging SDN solutions.
