40% of Citrix laptops employee-owned
Forty per cent of Citrix employees have bought their own work laptop, with some even choosing an iPad, according to Citrix ANZ director of desktop technology Toby Knight.
(088 - Laptop image by Marlon Bunday, CC BY-SA 2.0)
The "Bring Your Own Computer" program for Citrix employees began back in September 2008 and was designed to encourage employees to choose their own laptop rather than having one supplied to them. Workers were given up to US$2100 to buy a laptop. They would then use the Citrix virtual desktop environment on these devices for all their work-related activities. However, in 2009, after a year of the program running, only 10 per cent of the Citrix workforce had taken part in the program. Knight said this had a lot to do with economic conditions at the time.
"The thing that held us back last year was that we were in the middle of the global financial crisis, so we were delaying the funds for people to buy their own PC but we're past that now so that's the reason why we have accelerated a lot further," he said.
The percentage sky-rocketed this year as the world economy began to recover.
"Within Citrix we're at around 35 to 40 per cent uptake," Knight said, "Most people in the organisation [now] buy their own devices, which is probably a good thing."
Some employees had even begun taking up the Apple iPad.
"We have probably 20 or 30 iPads," he said.
According to Knight, there had been enormous interest in enterprise software for the iPad right from the date of its release last month. Many Australian companies had already lined up for virtual desktop apps for the iPad, he said.
"I could name 30 organisations in Australia who, on the day the iPad was released, were doing between 10 and 50 user trials on this technology," he said.
Knight declined to name specific organisations that were using the XenDesktop app for the iPad, but did add that large Australian retail banks, government and educational institutions had all expressed an interest.
"I think the interesting thing about the iPad is that when you look at the iPad itself it's a great consumer device, but what it's not good at is delivering enterprise applications easily to it," he added. "So in a number of ways Citrix has been pretty lucky in that we have the infrastructure in place to deliver enterprise apps to that device."
Bede Hackney, Citrix ANZ's director of the company's networking group said the emergence of smartphones and other mobile devices like the iPad were having a knock-on effect on networking infrastructure for remote access within organisations.
"It used to be that remote access was typically the smallest percentage of your employee base. With the emergence of these devices it's going to become the majority of your users actually acting as remote workers," he said. "This places different strains on your networking infrastructure in terms of access and security of access."
Hackney said this strain places Citrix's approach to desktop virtualisation at a strong advantage, and one the company is already moving on.
"We're actually working very closely with Apple on doing joint strategies," he said. "We've got some cloud providers that are getting on board with that and we expect to go to market pretty strongly over the next four weeks in delivering enterprise services to the iPad from a host of cloud providers."