Citrix and the mobile enterprise

I was reading through my notes on Citrix's planned announcements at its Synergy conference that is being held in San Francisco as you read this commentary. The company's announcements talk about technology that has the ability to directly address real world problems such as dealing with a multi-vendor computing environment that supports many computing platforms, operating systems, applications, computing styles and, increasingly, dealing with the form of compute outsourcing the industry is calling cloud computing.

While reviewing how far this company has come and how broad its reach is, I was forced to recall where it came from and some of its successes as well as bumps it has experienced while trying to address the needs of the market.

Citrix started out as an access virtualization company. It offered a way for applications to execute back in a data center and for people to be able to use it from their desktop and laptop systems regardless of where they were. Since that time, it has reached out into nearly every area of virtualization technology and into nearly every place where that technology is used. Over the years, it has developed or acquired application, processing, network, and storage virtualization products as well as both security and management tools to round out a complete virtualized world for industry standard systems.

Citrix is using this conference to lay out how it sees computing supporting the fast-paced, highly mobile and highly diverse world we see emerging today. Citrix is one of the few suppliers that has the ability for a person to start working on something on an Windows-based desktop system in the office, edit it at a colleague's desk using a Mac and then work with it again using a smartphone, tablet or just about any intelligent, network capable device. The application being used could easily be in a local data center, the organization's main data center or out in the clouds somewhere.

Rather than trying to lay out each and every product update, product launch or acquisition Citrix announced at Synergy this year, I'm going to just stand back and say that Citrix has evolved from humble beginnings into a supplier that really can reduce its customers overall costs, deal with a herd of remote computing devices while making the environment manageable and secure.