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Citrix turns SaaSy with new enterprise add-ons

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Deepa
New Update

ANAHEIM, USA: At the opening hour of Synergy 2013, Citrix chief executive (CEO) Mark Templeton drew in a lot of applause and cheers as we walked up on the stage. All this apparently hints to a lot of energy that the company is focusing on making enterprise back-stage of technology as smooth, seamless and invisible as possible. The momentum looks good as gear after gear the company seems to be enlarging its appetite beyond vanilla virtualisation.

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Some major updates that were revealed today corraborate the progress well.

The first in this series was a catch-up on how Project Avalon has been going when it comes to Citrix' effort on re-imagining desktop applications for Cloud Era. The first release of this project came out in the shape of Xen Desktop7 announcement.

The project was a multi-phased initiative to deliver Windows-as-a-cloud service and XenDesktop 7 , as stated, offers integrated Windows app and desktop mobility, easier deployment options and simplified management, all delivered through a new, cloud-style architecture, as per Citrix.

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The company feels that current XenDesktop and XenApp customers will find the new architecture easier than ever to deploy, manage and support.

Among a few of product evolution news, Citrix also announced Citrix XenMobile Enterprise edition. This, as it boasts confidently, 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.

Mark also happily shared the company's traction in many areas. He talked about 80 per cent growth of XenDesktop on Hyper-V as well as over 200 clouds in production for production-style or Amazon-style cloud platforms.

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Another good news he was buoyant with was Citrix' progress on CloudStack turning into the largest open source community with 35,000 members as he claimed.

He pointed at ShareFile's positive accentuating the market well and announced addition of ShareFiile StorageZone connections wherein it will connect directly to existing files in SharePoint and network drives. ShareFile is additionally made available on MS Azure as well. He announced that Desktop Player for Mac would be available now to allow anytime, anywhere access to virtual desktops.

Mobility and BYOD seemed to be leit motif of Synergy this time, a conference that has seen a turnout of about 6,000 attendees. Citrix is trying to board the wave with intense product stretches and dives in this area. Another announcement talked about how XenMobile Enterprise puts focus on enterprise by including secure mobile productivity apps such as e-mail and web browsing, as well as secure document sharing, syncing and editing.

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Citrix also announced a new mobile app market built for XenMobile, focused on business apps. The new app market will include over 80 apps from leading mobile app vendors - nearly three times the number supported by other mobile technology providers.

XenMobile Enterprise is available from June 2013. XenMobile Enterprise is licensed with per-device and per-user options on an annual or perpetual term.

The reporter is being hosted at the Synergy 2013 event by Citrix.

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