Citrix is keeping complacency on a leash, admitting that despite its market position, it can still learn from competing companies when it comes to enterprise mobility management (EMM).
The virtualisation vendor’s global mobile technologies vice-president, Aaron Cockerill, told ARN that the Cloud-based approach of its primary rival in Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ), AirWatch, a VMware company, has pushed Citrix to invest further in increasing its own Cloud capabilities.
“One of the things AirWatch has done better than Citrix up until more recently is address the midmarket through Cloud-based offerings,” Cockerill said. “They have a simple mobile device management (MDM) solution that is Cloud-delivered.”
“We can learn from them as to how to tackle that market and simplify the user experience in that area.”
But while Citrix has noted AirWatch’s Cloud game, it intends to maintain its focus on the enterprise space.
“At Citrix Synergy, we introduced parity with our premises and Cloud-based offering and introduced security certifications around Cloud-based deployment,” Cockerill said. “As a vendor, it is not wise to go after the exact same space as a competitor, though.”
“What we did was we enhanced our Cloud capabilities, but we are targeting these at large enterprises as opposed to midmarket. We learned from them to go after Cloud, but we have gone upstream to enterprise.”
Cockerill claims it is the right time to take Cloud-based EMM to enterprises as these companies are becoming increasing accepting of even outsourced and software-as-a-service (SaaS) based security. The likes of SaaS business applications, such as CRM via Salesforce.com, gained traction over the past two years, but Citrix consider security in terms of outsourced firewalls to be in its infancy, and is therefore chasing opportunities in that regard.
