Article Written by David Marshall
Citrix quietly announced that it has acquired Norskale, a French-based startup with a proven track record of optimizing workspace performance, accelerating application delivery, and enhancing environment scalability. The company has operated throughout the European, Asia-Pacific and Americas markets by providing a full-featured workspace and user environment management solution. With more than 100 customers worldwide and enterprise deployments reaching up to 80,000 seats, Norskale brings a welcomed amount of performance and scalability value to the Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop application and desktop virtualization solutions.
Demand for business mobility by end-users is creating far-reaching implications for how mission-critical applications are being delivered. These businesses are increasingly searching for solutions that help simplify the management of end-users as they move from desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones due to the complexity of managing these assets in silos.
But in the last couple of years, Citrix has fallen behind in this area. The company, which was once a market leader in this space, seemed to find itself playing catch up with competitors like VMware who in February of 2015 acquired Immidio to beat Citrix to the punch by offering its own Workspace Environment Management (WEM) solution. With that acquisition, VMware gained a strong UEM solution which they have been integrating more and more into their existing product lines.