Mark Temptleton, Citrix’s CEO, presented Citrix’s corporate strategy and vision. Although the session was presented under a non-disclosure agreement, I’ll offer a review of what I can say. As usual, Mark’s presentations are clear, believable and quite persuasive.
Company History
Citrix is now 23 years old and was founded in 1989. The company was based upon two ideas:
- Help customers manage and adapt to business changes
- Make it possible for people to work or play from anywhere
Virtual Workplace video from 1989
Mark presented a segment of a really fun “Virtual Workspace” video from the early days of Citrix. It was amazingly prescient and defines, in a sketch form, the world we are in today. It showed people working with a constellation of devices, from wherever they are and being able to work and share with others.
Segment focus
Mark discussed the company’s areas of focus and they are:
- Share and work
- Aggregate and Deliver
- Build and connect
- “Powering virtual workstyles and cloud services
He discussed efforts focused on offering better integration of online, desktop and cloud computing products. I noticed that he didn’t spend much time at all on server virtualization. I thought his discussion of “Meshability”/Front end integration and “Mashability/Back end integration was interesting and rang true for me.
Design
Mark pointed out that the company has started investing heavily on product and human factors design over the last 3 years. The goal is better aestetics and re-framing today’s services to make them more usable and drive better acceptance.
Integrating business and personal life
Mark started this section of his keynote by defining VUCA as volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. He believes that this is a driving force in IT now. He believes that consumer capability is outstripping enterprise IT’s ability to deliver. This will drive the “consumerization” of enterprise IT. He believes this will the main driving force in the world of IT for the next 10 years.
BYO3 – Apps, network, compute
Mark believes that we are entering the third generation of “bring your own…” that will include bring your own applications, your own networking and your own computing. This means that we are not entering the “Post PC” world, but are really entering the “Three PC era.” This means, to Citrix, that each of us with have our own devices to support our own personal cloud, the corporate private clouds and the public cloud. This will mean that we use a constellation of devices.
Snapshot analysis
I really liked Mark’s vision of how people will combine their work and personal lives in a new and different way that allows us to be better informed, be more productive and the like.
I really enjoyed his vision of time-slicing (choosing where and when to be productive), Mind-Sharing (collaboration with others from wherever we are), and Work-shifting (being able to work from wherever we are.)
All-in-all a very interesting session.
