Citrix joins the ‘reinvent the future of work’ chorus with a workspace app and security stuff

Citrix has used its Synergy conference to pitch itself as a vendor capable of changing the way you and your users work.

CEO David Henshall’s spiel is that organisation are using a multitude of on-prem, SaaS and cloud resources and users are therefore “having a hard time finding what they need” while “context switching” between different experiences. Security degrades, too, the CEO said, and IT departments response is often tools specific to each app or service.

Citrix has three offerings to address these problems.

The new “Workspace App” aggregates resources a worker needs and delivers a “digital workspace” on any device. There’s a dash of enterprise mobility management in there, too, to make it easy for sysadmins to set up the app and populate it with the resources need and are permitted to access. The XenMobile and XenDesktop brands have disappeared into the workspace, a marketing exercise El Reg just-about-predicted in January 2018.

“Access Control” does the heavy lifting of logging in to all the services and resources stuffed into the Workspace by offering a cloud-based single-sign-on service.

“Citrix Analytics” keeps an eye on all the activity to ensure nothing is going awry and will add AI and machine learning also do what Citrix calls “application performance and usage/operations”.

The new products build on stuff Citrix already does and the company’s pitch is integration. Fair enough, too: various vendors do most of the stuff Citrix can, but then need to be stitched together. Citrix is delivering on a long-articulated promise to make that stitching easier for users, while also exciting investors with the prospect of sales across multiple product lines.

Investors will be keen to see how it goes because Citrix’s Q1 2018 results, revealed in late April, revealed modest year-on-year revenue growth of five per cent and $697m of revenue. Net income produced a nicer number: $144m compared to 2017’s $70m. Subscription revenue ticked up by 49 per cent and hit 15 per cent of all revenue.

Citrix won’t have things all its own way: VMware, for one, can just about match its range and ServiceNow is using the same “re-invent work” spiel. The likes of Liferay argue that they can make digital workspaces that offer employee-and-customer facing experiences.

This week’s announcements represent Henshall’s vision for Citrix made flesh.

Now all the company has to do is finish it off – Access Control is a work in progress – and sell it. ®