Citrix Announces New Products and Services, Picks Microsoft Azure as Preferred Cloud

**Editor’s Note: Click here for our recently compiled list of new products and services.**

CITRIX SYNERGY — Citrix on Monday announced updates to the company’s product lines, including data and cloud delivery, networking and enterprise mobility, to support the digital business transformation.

The announcements were made during the Citrix Synergy event in Las Vegas. The new products and services deliver a unified workspace as a service, with access to apps and data from anywhere. The on-demand workspaces also give IT the ability to deliver and manage it all from a single, unified control plane.

“We’re in the midst of a significant transformation from being product-focused to becom(ing) a solution provider to deliver services from the cloud,” said Kirill Tatarinov, Citrix CEO. “Working with a broad range of partners, we will help you get your people much more productive by delivering [workspace as a service] with our partners and entire ecosystem of Citrix technology providers.”

Updates include: Information Rights Management for ShareFile; advanced app virtualization and VDI experience with XenApp and XenDesktop 7.9; XenMobile 10.3.5 mobile app management; and three new additions to the Citrix NetScaler family — NetScaler Management and Analytics System (NMAS), NetScaler CPX and NetScaler SD-WAN Enterprise Edition.{ad}

Also at Citrix Synergy, the company said it has selected Microsoft Azure as its preferred and strategic cloud going forward. In addition, Citrix and Microsoft are working together on new integrations specifically in regard to Citrix XenMobile, NetScaler, Microsoft Intune and the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS).

“We are thrilled to see how Citrix is delivering new value to businesses across the Microsoft platform Azure, Office 365 and Windows 10,” said Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO. “By selecting Azure as its strategic cloud platform, Citrix customers will have access to the full compute power, intelligence and scale of the Microsoft cloud.”

Citrix Cloud services unify Citrix products to deliver a digital workspace, including Citrix NetScaler, ShareFile, XenApp, XenDesktop and XenMobile. These offerings are available individually or can be accessed together as a unified workspace.

For products with hybrid components, Citrix Cloud also enables customers to deploy on to any cloud or infrastructure of their choice, giving businesses the flexibility to secure and manage their data and infrastructure to best meet the needs of their organization and regulatory environment, according to Citrix.

The Citrix Cloud also is designed to solve challenges Citrix partners face when building their businesses on Citrix technologies. Within the past quarter, Citrix introduced the Citrix License Usage Insights Service, a cloud service for Citrix service providers to help them manage their license usage reporting. To help partners leverage Citrix Cloud, Citrix is developing educational sessions aimed at enabling partners to accelerate their businesses and drive revenue.

According to IDC, in the next three to five years, the percentage of enterprises with digital transformation strategies will more than double. Also, IDC is predicting that at least half of IT spending will be cloud based by 2018.