By Al Solorzano, Vice President, End User Computing, Entisys360
Just got back from Citrix Summit last week. Great to see the EUC community partners and friends once again. I guess someone (Entisys360) won another award (Citrix 2018 Partner of the Year – US) but that’s another article.
Anyway at last Citrix Synergy, Citrix started to unveil their 3 key pillars driving their organization: Security, Experience, Choice. So here are some thoughts on how Citrix is handling those and using them to deliver solutions to our clients.
Security : Citrix is a Security company (my opinion)
I’ve always personally thought of Citrix (and other EUC products like VMware’s Horizon/AirWatch or BlackBerry for that matter) as developing security “related” solutions such VDI with Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops, MDM/MAM with Citrix Endpoint Management, web site security with Citrix ADC (formerly Citrix NetScaler) and document sharing with Citrix Content Collaboration. This wasn’t always the case as Citrix was used to solve a point problem for someone. However more recently Citrix has pivoted to leveraging these solutions together (along with some more recent products like Citrix Analytics ) to create the “Secure Digital Perimeter”. It is Citrix’s belief that “a digital workspace provides a unified and contextual end to end experience for users across all types of apps and content accessed at any location and on any device that is secure by default”. I know this story will resonate with every organization trying to deal with the multitude of attack vectors and thousand of security point solutions.
Experience : Citrix is focusing on the Intelligent Workspace
With the spread of smart phones and tables over the past 10+ years, we now all have hundreds of apps on our devices and most likely only have 10-15 that we use consistently. Each app doing something specific (e.g. expenses go into Concur), but then I have to go to another app for another task (e.g. my timesheet goes into our CRM) and then to another app for something else (e.g our ticketing system to see how many more tickets I have this morning). Don’t even get me started on trying to get the data between any of those apps when necessary. Citrix’s acquisition of Sapho (video link of Sapho is located here also) looks to change that. Sapho will bring your tasks to you rather you hunting them down in 5-10 different apps.
Work smarter, not harder. Check out this out video of Sapho in action.
Below is a screen capture of interface Sapho developed to bring all your tasks showing Workday, ServiceNow, Salesforce pending tasks or events without having to go into each of them. (Note: the Opened By: on the right. Duncan Idaho. Dune by Frank Hebert. “He who controls the spice controls the universe.”)
Choice : Citrix is accelerating customer deployments by increasing options
As architects of EUC solutions for our clients, we need as much choice as we can, because no two clients are the same. Here are just a sample of some of the questions that client ask us. Does this run in AWS/GCP/Azure? What if need it to run on a hybrid cloud architecture? Is there a hosted offering? Can I buy perpetual licensing? Can I buy subscription? Which Hypervisor does this run on? Is this supported on Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) or do I need to still use traditional infrastructure? How often do I upgrade or is there an evergreen hosted solution? Can I lockdown how one user uses the system, but open it for another user to do more tasks? What can of devices can I use? (I could keep going but let’s stop for now).
Citrix is able to address all of these questions to allow one client to run 100% hosted in Azure, another client to run on hybrid cloud with HCI with VMware ESXi (still the most common hypervisor platform and fully supported by Citrix) and AWS, another client to leverage Citrix+Azure DaaS and yet another client to run all on-premises using their traditional infrastructure.
Citrix is
- multi-architecture (public/private/hybrid)
- multi-cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP)
- multi-hypervisor (VMware vSphere/Citrix Hypervisor/Microsoft Hyper-V/Nutanix AHV)
- multi- licensing model (perpetual/subscription hosted/As a Service)
- multi-OS (Windows Server and Client OSes, Linux OSes like RHEL, CentOS, SUSE, or Ubuntu)
- multi-device (too many to name but the usual Windows devices, iPhones/iPads, MacOS, Chromebooks, Linux devices, thin clients like IGEL and NComputing, etc.)
More choice than any EUC vendor. That makes my job easier and makes my clients happier.
tldr; Citrix’s vision is to enable their products and their clients with Choice, Experience and Security. I think Citrix continues to nail their vision with product development and acquisitions. Citrix will continue to be a leader in the future of how users work.
If you haven’t started planning for Citrix Synergy 2019 in Atlanta, GA (May 21-23) than you really should. You can learn all about the Intelligent Workspace and more while you visit Hot ‘Lanta.
