Perspectives from Citrix Synergy: Connecting the Dots for Mobile Solutions

With the advent of the Cloud Era, an increasingly mobile workforce is looking for easier ways to work the way they want – with anyone, from any location, on any device. Citrix is enabling these mobile workstyles with an expanding portfolio of “personal cloud” solutions making it easier for companies of all sizes to “go mobile” – empowering employees to interact securely with any combination of people, data, apps and devices – with market leading products with lots of cool new features announced today.

However, in addition to market leading products, Citrix takes it a step further with simple but powerful integrations across their people, data, apps and device technologies, delivering value that is more than the sum of the parts. Citrix is bringing it all together in a seamless experience for people with a series of integrations between its user-facing apps like GoToMeeting, GoToAssist, Podio, ShareFile and Receiver and support for 3rd party apps and services like Evernote, GetSatisfaction, Microsoft Skydrive and Google Apps.

This came through again and again in the demos at yesterday’s Synergy Keynote with Mark Templeton. First up was Podio, a cool product, recently acquired by Citrix. Through the Podio collaboration platform, people can connect and assemble with their teams, set up workspaces, access free apps from the Podio app market, extend or modify existing apps, create new ones to support their preferred workflows, collaborate and work the way they want to and be more effective as a result.

But the really cool part came after the basic Podio demo. Tommy Ahlers, the new VP of Social Collaboration at Citrix, showed how easy it was to connect and share documents with ShareFile integration. And then, he showed how simple it was to schedule, start or access GoToMeeting sessions directly from Podio. It was pretty amazing to get that level of integration done in just a few weeks.

Tommy Ahlers, Vice President, Social Collaboration, Citrix Systems demos the integration capabilities of Podio with other Citrix tools

And it got even better. Tommy showed how easy it was to use apps – Windows apps delivered virtually through XenApp with documents managed in ShareFile, all from the Podio workspace – a pretty cool, seamless experience, that just worked. It was pretty cool to see what was possible in this virtual app, meeting app, data service and social app mash-up. One of those “a hah” moments in the keynote. You really started to see the value of the acquisitions Citrix has made over the past few months.

And there was more. Citrix also introduced the integration of ShareFile with CloudGateway, Citrix Receiver and XenApp, another great example of how the integration across data, apps and devices helps companies of all sizes to “go mobile” faster. CloudGateway provides role-based provisioning of the data sharing service and apps to users. Once employees have their ShareFile account provisioned, they can access all their data on any device through Citrix Receiver. They can access and edit their data with either apps/readers available on the device or with Windows applications hosted by XenApp for a rich content editing experience. In the event of a lost device or an employee leaving the organization, IT can instantly de-provision the user’s account and remotely wipe all of their data in ShareFile and Receiver.