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Cisco Systems and Citrix Systems, whose partnership already includes work in such areas as desktop virtualization, cloud services and mobile device management, are now coming together around mobile infrastructure.
At the Citrix Synergy 2014 show in Los Angeles on May 6, the two companies announced Cisco Mobile Workspace Solution with Citrix, combining Cisco’s computing, networking and security capabilities with Citrix’s new Workspace Suite of mobile of virtualization and mobility tools. The goal is to give organizations a complete enterprise mobility infrastructure offering, according to officials with both companies.
Citrix introduced Workspace Suite during the show, part of a larger group of announcements around mobility, virtualization and networking.
“This new Cisco Mobile Workspace Solution with Citrix, built on the Citrix Workspace Suite, provides the complete hardware and software technology stack for delivering all the applications, content and tools workers need on any device,” Prashanth Shenoy, director of enterprise networks at Cisco, said in a post on the company blog. “This new Workspace Solution is excellent for companies moving into the second stage of their mobility journey—where their focus is on providing all the applications, content and services their employees need on their devices. This solution can help your employees, partners and consultants work and collaborate on their mobile and desk devices, from pretty much anywhere.”
Businesses are under increasing pressure from an increasingly mobile workforce to make it easier for employees to access the corporate network and business applications at any time, from anywhere and on any device, from notebooks to tablets to smartphones. IT departments dealing with bring-your-own-device (BYOD) environments are working to make sure that while access is made available, data and the corporate infrastructure is secure.
“Today we are … offering customers a powerful solution that enhances user experience and productivity while simplifying and securing IT infrastructure in a cost-effective manner,” Sudhakar Ramakrishna, senior vice president and general manager for Citrix’s Enterprise and Service Provider Division, said in a statement.
The joint offering will be available by the end of this month.
A recent Cisco survey of 400 enterprise and midmarket IT professionals highlighted the need for mobility solutions that improve the user experienced while protecting the company’s data. Forty-nine percent of those surveyed said their organizations had no companywide mobility strategy in place, and of those, 43 percent said integrating mobility solutions is straightforward.
The top concerns are mobile security (78 percent), mobile device management (65 percent) and VPN access (64 percent). The top mobility challenge, according to 64 percent of respondents, was managing security risks.
The joint Cisco-Citrix solution leverages such Cisco technologies as Cisco Unified Access for highly dense mobile environments and Identity Services Engine for automated policy enforcement. Citrix is contributing such solutions within the Workspace Suite as XenMobile for automated policy enforcement, as well as application and desktop virtualization capabilities.
The companies also are making reference design architectures available to make it easier for customers to deploy and implement the mobility platform and ensure pretested interoperability.