Citrix announces new cloud-computing services, acquisition
May 9, 2012
Fort Lauderdale-based Citrix Systems on Wednesday opened its annual Synergy conference in San Francisco and announced a series of new products, services and enhancements aimed at easing the transition from the PC era to the cloud computing era.
Previously, it was assumed that employees were going to work in offices on devices owned and managed by companies on large corporate computer systems and using well controlled applications, Wes Wasson, Citrix’s senior vice president and chief marketing officer, said in a pre-conference briefing.
“The key to success in the cloud era is to design everything you do with the assumption that everyone is mobile and is using a mix of personal devices, communications over wireless networks you do not own and using cloud systems,” Wasson said. Young people today are accustomed to working with a wide variety of apps and often arrive at a company with a set of their favorite apps. “This is the new normal.”…
Citrix, a company that develops and sells cloud, networking and virtualization technologies, is unveiling team collaboration options for employees using technology from its recent acquisition of Podio, new enhancements to its popular ShareFile file sharing and storage service and Apache Cloudstack, which will allow companies “to build true Amazon-style clouds,” Wasson said.
Among the innovations announced in San Francisco, was Citrix CloudGateway 2, a new update to its enterprise mobility solution that adds extensive mobile application management capabilities, including full support for native HTML 5, iOS and Android apps, according to the company.
The new CloudGateway release also adds integration with Citrix ShareFile, giving customers a single unified control point for all apps and data enterprise-wide. This allows employees to be as productive on-the-go as they are in the office with access to their personalized set of applications and data when and where they need them, the company said.
Citrix announced a set of new desktop virtualization products and HDX devices that help organizations transform their Windows desktops and apps into a cloud-like service that can be managed centrally and delivered to any device in any location. These will help to ease the transition to virtual desktops, drive down acquisition costs and provide expanded capabilities to businesses of all sizes, Citrix said.
The technology company also announced the acquisition of Massachusetts-based Virtual Computer, a provider of enterprise-scale management solutions for client-side virtualization. Citrix will combine the newly-acquired Virtual Computer technology with its XenClient hypervisor to create the new Citrix XenClient Enterprise edition.
Citrix recently reported first quarter 2012 revenues of $589 million, up from $491 million for the same period in 2011, and profits of $68 million for the quarter, down from $74 million in first quarter 2011.