By Roy Illsley, Principal Analyst, IT Software

At the recent Citrix Synergy conference in Barcelona, more than 4,000 delegates heard Citrix’s latest mobile and cloud-enabled-world message. The announcements in Mark Templeton’s keynote this year were based on evidence of what Citrix has, or will in the near term, deliver, and were less visionary in nature than previous announcements.

The four key announcements were: project Avalon, which will act as the cloud orchestration layer; storage zones, which will allow users to select where data is stored; MBX technology applied to Cloud Gateway, which will wrap controls and security around applications; and advances in HDX technology to support greater use of video. While project Avalon is a glimpse into the future direction of Citrix, the other three technologies are all recently released and available.

Project Avalon considers a future where Windows remains the dominant enterprise technology

The premise behind …