Citrix Expands Mobile Apps Push at Synergy

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Citrix is a company that has long been about enabling users, mobile or otherwise, to access their applications and work remotely.

As part of Citrix’s Synergy conference today, the company is now pushing its mobile and remote worker efforts even further with new XenDesktop, XenMobile and ShareFile offerings.

XenDesktop

Mick Hollison, VP of Integrated Marketing and Strategy at Citrix, explained to Datamation that the new XenDesktop 7 release is all about enabling the delivery of Windows desktops as a cloud service.

“XenDesktop 7 is desktop and app virtualization re-imagining for a cloud and mobile centric world,” Hollison said.

A key part of XenDesktop is actually about enabling desktop Windows apps to run well on mobile IOS and Android devices. Citrix’s HDX Mobile technology, which is part of XenDesktop 7, provides H.264 video compression, delivering a better degree of bandwidth efficiency. With more efficient bandwidth usage, applications stream to mobile devices faster than before.

The HDX system also will also trigger pop-up keyboards for mobile users for their Windows applications.

Going a step further, Citrix is also giving developers a new Mobile SDK to mobilize their existing Windows applications, to provide more mobile-friendly user interface sand menu systems.

XenMobile

The new XenMobile is built on technology that Citrix gained through the acquisition of Mobile Device Management (MDM) vendor Zenprise in December of 2012.

A key part of the new XenMobile solution is a series of mobile productivity apps called, ‘Worx’. The apps include essential productivity tools such as mail, calendar and contacts and also include a secure mobile browser.

The secure mobile browser leverages an application specific Micro-VPN (Virtual Private Network) that XenMobile provides. With the micro-VPN, each application can get its own encrypted tunnel in a bid to further increase mobile security.

Sharefile

Citrix is also boosting the capabilities of its secure sharing Sharefile system. The system will now enable Microsoft Sharepoint users to both check-in and check-out documents using Sharefile.

“So companies don’t have to pick-up documents that are already in a repository and move them somewhere else,” Hollison said. “Sharefile can now crawl those repositories in addition to native Sharefile storage.”

Cloud

While the new Citrix solutions are enabled for the cloud era, they aren’t all entirely running in the cloud, yet.

Hollison said that the next major release of XenDesktop will place the entire product line from an infrastructure perspective, on top of the Citrix Cloud platform.

“So XenDesktop will gain all of the multi-tenancy capabilities you’d expect in a true cloud service,” Hollison said. “That’s set for the next release that is scheduled for delivery sometime in early 2014.”

By moving to a cloud infrastructure, Citrix will be paving the way for the delivery of its software assets as a service.

“Anything that you would typically associate with true cloud infrastructure, whether it’s mutli-tenancy, orchestration and automation or metering for service providers, all of those are directionally where we are going with the product line,” Hollison said.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Datamation and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.