It’s a BYOD world, according to senior executives from Citrix Systems Inc. and Zenprise Inc., a Redwood City, Calif.-based mobile device management vendor that was just acquired by Citrix of Santa Clara, Calif.
The bring your own device (BYOD) trend was the main reason for the two companies getting together.
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Citrix’ vice president and GM of its Mobile Solutions division, Sumit Dhawan said BYOD has lead customer in search of a complete solution to manage devices and data. Citrix did develop its CloudGateway product for the mobility space, but more was necessary and it led the company to Zenprise.
Dhawan said that Zenprise technology will help Citrix in solving customer issues with the management of mobile devices because of BYOD.
He added that Zenprise already has more than 1,000 customers and more than a million devices being managed by its technology because of the issues around BYOD. “Zenprise provides a solution for data centre and the cloud. It’s also highly complimentary technology to Citrix for our mobile portfolio such as CloudGateway,” Dhawan said.Citrix intends to integrate the Zenprise solution for mobile device management with CloudGateway and another product called Me@Work, which is a product for managing mobile apps and data. Citrix’s go-to-market message with its mobile portfolio and Zenprise is to offer solutions for managing mobile devices, apps and data from a single, integrated enterprise mobility product line. The company believes this approach will offer customers security and control along with giving employees the freedom to choose devices of their choice.
“What’s unique here is that the products are user centric and when we looked at others in this space they were absent of this. Other mobile device management companies look at IP rather than the user perspective,” Dhawan added. Amit Pandey, President and CEO, Zenprise, said BYOD is here to stay. “In mobility, there is a plethora of devices in all shapes and sizes. In the enterprise most of these devices are un-trusted. We have been managing these devices for some time and unlike Zenprise competitors, we have our eye on the apps and the data,” he said.Zenprise was one of the first vendors to offer Sharepoint access on a mobile device, Pandey said. He added that Zenprise was already starting down the path to develop a product similar to CloudGateway when Citrix came calling.
“The management of apps is a headache with all those operating systems out there. It’s a real problem. There are apps on all types of operating systems and working with Citrix it will help us deliver solutions to better manage these apps,” Pandey said.
Citrix anticipates closing on the acquisition during the first quarter of 2013. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.