Citrix unveiled the Workspace App at its annual Synergy conference yesterday, underlining its vision of a simplified and unified digital workspace.
Making the keynote address at the Anaheim Convention Centre, Citrix CEO David Henshall introduced “the world’s first unified digital workspace for business” as a way for teams and users to access their applications, content, files and information in one space.
The Citrix Workspace App is “one way to organise, access and open all of your files, regardless of whether they’re on your hard drive, on your network drive, on cloud or anywhere in between,” Henshall said.
He added the app, available in-browser, on desktop, or on mobile, was “one that integrates with what you already have, what’s already existing on your on-premise infrastructure, and [is] ready to support you when you’re moving to the cloud.”
“The result is everything you need to be productive in one single unified experience,” he said.
The app sees Citrix unify a series of isolated digital workspace products, also tying into Henshall’s vision of “people-centric computing” – ridding organisations of unnecessary complexity and barriers in a bid to boost productivity.
Key features include prebuilt SaaS integrations, universal search, and all your apps and files brought together in one space. It’s essentially an app version of the Citrix Workspace Service, which debuted at last year’s Citrix Synergy conference, hosted in Orlando.
The company’s former CEO, Mark Templeton, even showed off a prototype concept called Citrix Workspace Services at Citrix Synergy 2014. The prototype version featured the ability to host apps where the business wants to, behaving as a single destination for users to do everything, no matter where they were.
However, Citrix’s latest rollout puts a focus on a mobile-first and cloud-first work environment. The idea of putting people at the heart of things has featured heavily at this year’s Synergy conference, and is a concept that Citrix’s VP of product management and workspace services, Sridhar Mullapudi, claimed was key to developing the Workspace App.
“In a lot of our conversations with customers and partners, a lot of point products and solutions are cobbled together to either solve their experience need, or security need, but it’s a broken experience for users – it’s just fractured experience, and what it does is frustrate the users, and just lowers productivity,” he said.
“So the number one thing is having that great productivity experience for users so they get things done; doesn’t matter what device, or what kind of application they’re trying to launch.”
Picture: Keumars Afifi-Sabet/Cloud Pro