Unexpected acquisitions, unholy alliances and co-opetition characterize a dynamic and challenging battle for mobile management, security and app delivery market dominance. The tumultuous rise and fall of mobile companies is almost daily news. It was this in mind that I attended
Mark Templeton, Citrix's CEO, launched the meeting with a vision of the marketplace and insights on the future direction of Citrix. He painted a picture of how Citrix progressed from a remote access company in 2003 to a provider of mobile workspace solutions. He discussed the next evolution as “Workspace as a Service” (Yes, just when you thought you'd seen all variants of the "as a service" acronym, we add a new one WaaS.) Workspace as a Service is the concept of any app, on any device on any infrastructure. It's a great vision. If Citrix can deliver on it, it will have a successful business. However, this vision of “anyness” is harder to deliver that it sounds.
How should companies prepare? Templeton offered five workspace imperatives that companies must respond to in order to be successful. These imperatives are:
- Design for what’s next: do you know? Your company needs a new approach and imagination to put this in place. Businesses need to be able to respond to the next device, app, location, employee, contractor, and reorganizations. These changes never come when you plan for them.
- Game over: consumerization has won. Whether you call it bring you own device, apps or identity, it’s a mindset change that we believe is happening and needed. We hear it from customers that the infrastructure is a commodity. The price of infrastructure is being set by Amazon and
Microsoft and it’s getting harder to justify doing it yourself. IT is thinking about getting out of the factory business and moving up the stack to design, experience and delivery - Secure what matters: apps, data and use. Device security gives a false sense of security. It could be a virtual desktop, VM container etc. Companies must understand usage and identity.
- The power of “any” in one infrastructure. A company wants to design once and reuse infrastructure. Today, companies have bought technologies incrementally to address certain pain points. What Templeton called an "If- Then infrastructure". With this approach, he states a business won't get technology reuse. Companies must build the next infrastructure to be device agnostic where it can broker any set of apps and data while running it on your choice of infrastructure.
- Deliver for human and business outcome. Companies are moving from simply running infrastructure to providing technical innovations and outcomes. Templeton said "When is a company's
Apple store moment? A company needs to be accountable for the entire experience from the origin to the end to end usage." A company needs to compete on experiences that drive an individual's delight as well as a business outcome.
Templeton also shared five Citrix priorities that will help it capitalize on this market transition. The strategy will focus on:
- Enabling customer migration and transition to a new platform that spans premise, hybrid and cloud solutions. Companies need easier, faster and simpler ways to build application service delivery infrastructure.
- Increasing focus on industry sectors where secure app and delivery solutions deliver premium value
- High-value integration across product lines for differentiation, automation and customer value
- Innovations that drives adoption, differentiation and consumption of out core software infrastructure. You need to drive consumption of the products as well as sales
- Increasing effectiveness and efficiencies of product development and go-to-market
The interesting takeaway from the Citrix keynote is that a mobility vendor can only be successful by providing a modular, yet integrated, portfolio of services that spans from mobility through the cloud. It's a cloud first and mobile first world. Are you ready?
