Wes Wasson, Citrix CMO, took the stage at the Citrix analyst event to discuss some of the philosophy behind today's and future products. He then discussed future directions. Unfortunately, I'm only going to be able to speak in very ambiguous terms about those products.
Citrix has taken many of the industry's basic assumptions and turned them around to define the company's product strategy. They are basing their strategy on what used to be exceptions and are now becoming today's standards.
Assumptions Exceptions
Mobile Working in an office
Personal Company provided
Wireless access Wired access
Cloud-based On-premise systems
Micro-centric Monolithic
Stores Suites
Enabling a mobile work style
Here is a summary of what Wes said about how Citrix is supporting a highly mobile workforce in today's IT environment.
- People and Apps need to be able to access data from any device. While desktop computing has traditionally been the foundation of a computing environment, we're seeing a world in which Apple, Android and HTML5 are increasingly requirements. Citrix sees today's desktops as a container for applications and data.
- Wes pointed out that GoToAssist as a new way to provide support from anywhere to make support a mobile function as well as working in a mobile environment
- He discussed GoToMeeting to allow people to collaborate from anywhere and showed some very interesting extentions that we are likely to see in the future.
- Discussed Citrix's acquisition of Podia to extend collaboration to teams
He also discussed ShareFile "a secure file sharing for business".
Unfortunately the rest of this session was covered by the non-disclosure agreement. I can say that I was impressed by Citrix's vision and what they're planning to do to help the industry realize that vision.