The start of Citrix’s Synergy Summit 2011 yesterday in Barcelona, Spain, saw Mark Templeton, CEO of the company, introduce the audience to a range of new products and applications during his keynote address. Most of the announcements expand and add to Citrix’s strategy of promoting bring-your-own-technology (BYOD) within enterprises.
“The IT industry is besieged with consumerisation and a demand for more mobility and an integrated platform which allows us to access the same information from different devices, Citrix is addressing this with the launch of CloudGateway, the industry’s first unified service broker that aggregates, controls and delivers Windows, web, SaaS and mobile apps to any user on any device. We are also introducing today the Netscaler SDX that allows consolidating all delivery services whether web or Windows-based,” said Templeton.
Templeton used VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) to define consumerisation. As the current world scenario presents these four elements, companies like Citrix have to build solutions that help address and minimise the effects of these factors.
Templeton also talked about a new “Citrix HDX Ready System-on-Chip (SoC)” initiative, designed to enable an entirely new generation of devices to deliver high-definition virtual apps and desktops. The company stated that the new chip will be produced by Texas Instruments and put into commercial devices by NComputing as well as other partners to be named.
He says that the reference design Citrix has come up with for the chip could be implemented in a variety of devices including zero-client boxes the size of cigarette packages, monitors, keyboards and cable TV set-top boxes.
These smaller devices could find places in hospitals where they could be deployed on carts moved room-to-room or on factory floors.
The chip would offer hardware assistance optimized for virtual desktops to make optimal use of bandwidth and to boost performance. The chip would replace other individual chips that otherwise are compiled on a motherboard at greater cost
Announcing the decision to acquire Apps-DNA and expanding on the recent partnership with Cisco, Templeton announced that the company is adding data sharing to its GoToMeeting collaboration service. Technology for the new feature comes from its ShareFile technology. This includes what Citrix calls Follow-me Data Fabric, in which the service enables a range of devices, including mobile devices, to search, share, sync, send, encrypt and remote-wipe data.
The same technology is also available later this quarter with Citrix Receiver client software.
The company is also announcing the addition of WAN optimization to its CloudBridge gear that connects data centers to cloud-based infrastructure-as-a-service networks. So when data centers tap public clouds for more computing resources, the traffic between them and the cloud is optimized to use less bandwidth and be more responsive.
“Clouds are built to deliver applications. It is all about going mobile and connecting every kind of device and every kind of application. The future is about these clouds providing such productivity, agility and flexibility that it helps people, business and IT deal with this world of uncertainty, this VUCA world,” concluded Templeton.
Aparna Shivpuri Arya is writing live from Citrix Synergy Summit 2011 in Barcelona. This story includes contributions from IDG’s News Service.
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