Last week, I attended a Citrix analyst relations summit program to learn about the company’s direction and strategy. While the main-tent program was longer on vision than it was on execution details, there were some aspects of the proceedings that I found compelling.
First off, there weren’t a lot of net new things being introduced, other than some roadmaps shared under NDA and a truly cool multi-station mobile work experience demo. But that’s ok. Too often, tech companies feel compelled to forever be pushing “something new,” when in reality IT pros need vendors to stick to existing story lines, execute, and deliver. I’d count Citrix as one of the latter.
Citrix has positioned itself in the technology arena as being the essential glue between applications, infrastructure and the end-user/customer. Its solutions are mostly based on solving problems for the enterprise, however a growing number can be applicable to commercial/external use cases.
What I found most interesting about the overall Citrix strategy is that it aligns quite nicely with the high level vision that we at EMA endorse. The vision starts with recognizing that the end result and goal of all IT investments and initiatives are to improve human and business outcomes. The Citrix vision then includes the next layer of detail by recognizing that three core elements must come together to make this possible – IT infrastructure, applications, and the end user device. Oh – and security has to be everywhere. Citrix refers to this as its “Any app, Any cloud, Any device” (and I’d add “securely”) strategy for the most flexible and effective IT-empowered working environments possible.
The EMA vision for IT transformation includes all of this, as well as a healthy dose of service management, automation, and orchestration to tie it all together. We also pay attention to another layer of technology and best practices regarding business outcomes, in the form of Business Intelligence (BI).
While Citrix does have some offerings that fall into the categories of applications (totaling $500M in SaaS) and infrastructure (such as the CloudPlatform, XenServer, NetScaler, and CloudBridge products), those remain complementary story lines to it’s primary solutions in the third element area – the end point where workers ultimately access applications.
While I will leave detailed commentary re: endpoint delivery technologies to my esteemed colleague, Steve Brasen, I have to mention one of the key announcements made at this particular event. Citrix announced its “Software Defined Workplace” solution initiative. Citrix needed some way to be assertive around the whole “Software-Defined” industry trend. Here’s a link to the press release, as well as a link to an interview on the topic that Network World posted with CEO Mark Templeton.
In my view, this isn’t really anything new or different, other than a nice marketing label that sums up what Citrix would like to be known for – secure, mobile access to the apps and services people need to do their work, from any device. The company plans to further expand solutions for achieving flexibility in virtual workspaces, server-based apps, mobility, and virtual desktop. They would have done this anyways, regardless of the new label, but it does fit into the current trend and lingo. And frankly, there isn’t any other company out there today that can bring all of the pieces to bear to the same degree and completeness as Citrix.
But there is one other detail behind the SDWorkplace that I will address directly. None of it works unless you are connected via a highly available, high performing network. Citrix knows this, and has made investments in improving network delivery of its workplace enabling technologies, via NetScaler and CloudBridge. Some of the technologies included in ByteMobile will be helpful here, as well as those acquired along with Framehawk in January 2014.
Besides these control-side approaches, visibility is hugely important, and Citrix has made progress here with its NetScaler Insight Center products, which are available as features included when you buy NetScaler appliances. There’s not a ton of public info out there about the Insight products, although an example PDF for the HDX Insight module can be found here. There is also a module for Web traffic insights. Both leverage AppFlow technology implemented within NetScaler and CloudBridge.
Overall, I’m glad to see Citrix driving the conversation towards human/business outcomes. We need that context to keep the rest of what we IT geek types busy ourselves with on a day-to-day basis. New tech is cool, for sure, but will it really, truly help us do a better job of making IT’s internal and external customers more productive and efficient? That’s the key question that we need to keep asking ourselves.