Las Vegas, NV – It may have taken until mid-2016, but Citrix is all-in on the cloud.
At its Synergy conference in Las Vegas, the desktop virtualization company took to the stage to deliver a message that, by now, the industry is accustomed to hearing.
“The cloud debate is over,” the company’s newly appointed chief executive Kirill Tatarinov (pronounced taTArinov), adding that some 90 per cent of companies now use public cloud solutions.
It was not surprising that the other three major trends identified were mobile, big data analytics, and IoT.
What was more noteworthy, however, was how this would be achieved, which is by puttings its solutions on the cloud in partnership with Microsoft.
“We’re taking our longstanding partnership with Microsoft to the next level.” Tatarinov said. He followed up by announcing integration between Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) and Intune with XenMobile and NetScaler, NetScaler with Azure Active Directory, and finally enabling XenDesktop-powered VDI to deliver Windows 10 desktop-as-a-service from Azure cloud.
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“It’s only logical that for customers who run Windows 10 that we to work with the Azure Cloud,” he said.
This means a couple of changes, including Microsoft relaxing Windows 10 licensing requirements to accommodate VDI deployments, in a hope that the move will also drive adoption of the operating system and Office 365.
“Later this year, Citrix will offer customers who have licensed Windows 10 Enterprise (Current Branch for Business) on a per-user basis the option to manage their Windows 10 images on Azure through its XenDesktop VDI solution,” Citrix said in a statement.
Down the line, both Citrix and Microsoft also see convergence of their various solutions into broader tools that manage all identities, applications, and devices regardless of form factor.
“We’re aligning our roadmaps,” Tatarinov said.