Citrix and BYOB- Bring Your Own Bullet

ANAHEIM, USA: When the cat asked her, "Do you know where you want to go?", a clueless Alice shrugged. The cat had no choice but to say, "Then how does it matter, any road will take you there."

Meeting Natalie Lambert, Director, Product Marketing at Citrix Systems gave a superb opportunity to understand why the mobility road matters so much to this synonymous-with-desktop-virtualisation big enchilada. Also, a chance to check if they have the whole enchilada all figured out too.

It turns out they do know where they want to go, and very precisely. But why? The questions and curiosity were only accentuated more as Citrix has announced XenMobile Enterprise this Synergy. This is an edition that purportedly combines mobile device, app and data management, a unified corporate app store, mobile productivity apps and "one-touch" live support into an inclusive solution for delivering mobile services to business, as the company wraps it.

Interestingly, Gartner, Inc., has positioned the company in the leader's quadrant of the 2013 Magic Quadrant for Mobile Device Management (MDM) Software report. As stated there, the report assesses Citrix XenMobile, a comprehensive solution that gives users device and app choice while also enabling IT to meet its management and compliance requirements.

Citrix has also announced a new mobile app market built for XenMobile, focused on business apps. that will include over 80 apps from leading app vendors in the mobile space, something that it tags as nearly three times the number supported by other mobile technology providers.

Other technology vendors! Well, that reminds you instantly of how VMware too has announced availability of two VMware ready devices, LG Intuition and Razr M by Motorola - on Verizon Wireless. It is touted that these devices are now equipped with VMware's virtualization technology required to run its dual personal solution, VMware Horizon Mobile. The company has perched its proposition on a stark gap. As it stated at the release, one of the reasons for Android not being dominant is its fragmentation, which makes it very difficult for IT to wrap their hands and heads around them. It is confident that VMware Horizon Mobile leverages device virtualization to normalize that fragmentation and allows IT to deploy and manage its own Android workspace that looks and behaves the same on any Android device.

So, how do all these new updates affect Citrix's mobility tracks? Do they have all the battery and bullets that it will take from here on? Does Natalie's cheerful and buoyant confidence echo in a portfolio geared up for a market full of beeps of challenges and ringtones of excitement ahead? Let's find out.

The so-called split personality launch has caught some attention from the market. How is your strategy different or stronger when it comes to what VMWare is doing with Verizon handshake and Dual Persona platform?

Ours is a different strategy. When you put hypervisor on a device, it's a different space. They are a lot inclined towards Android so it cuts some users right away. The things that matter are usability, focus on UI, sharpening the device, opening an app freshly or customizing it. The breadth and depth of various environments is vital so to ensure the user does not have to live with a chopped experience. Would you swallow some security benefits at the cost of a user experience? That's a big question. We put a lot of emphasis on that piece. Even if the user loses the device, we can secure the apps well. At the same time, we will not let any limitations frustrate the user on UI. Only we have come up with something as enterprise-ready as XenMobile that takes in its scope questions like privacy issues or customization issues as well. It's not about managing the device and all the big headache now. It's only about managing the apps. That's simpler and better.

BYOD has also showered the industry with a lot of legal skirmishes, wipe-out stories and privacy concerns for users. What's your observation here? Are we on to throwing the baby out with the water soon?

It's a tough choice that organisatons have to make at the end of the day. Every enterprise and its priorities are different. Example- for one enterprise we find that they prefer their corporate device locked down and no other applications are accommodated or no access to app stores is allowed, or they are wiped out based on geo-location too at times, On the other hand, we have a customer who instead prefers the way of policies and checks at regular points. Then there is another enterprise who prefers full mobilization of data. So it is about understanding what your user needs. Our solutions enable all choices and scenarios as per the user.

Any latency issues?

 

None, as they are all native apps. There are no such limitations as usually no big applications usually run from mobiles.

How would you define your progress on SDK and API fronts?

We are well entrenched here and with a lot of momentum be it connections to MDX or third-party SDK related work.

What's happening for the space beyond Windows? Like Android segments?

We recognize that users need other web and SaaS applications like Ios OR Android. XenMobile certainly looks beyond Windows, specially for mobile users and we aim at supporting various OS environments.

So XenMobile is filling you with lot of hope ahead?

Citrix has the capability and the wherewithal to cater across all mobile segments, specially the ones that are indeed commoditised. We are really excited to provide CIOs with the kind of apps and answers they want.