Citrix has warned products sold under a legacy licensing scheme will face a “loss of functionality” as the company shifts to a new framework next year.

In a blog post published 8 September, the company detailed plans to move to the new licensing scheme, which is set to come into effect in April 2026. Citrix said this shift will deliver a cloud-based framework in a bid to deliver “streamline licensing and faster support”.

Citrix currently operates under a file-based licensing system, which means that customers receive license files specifically applied to customer-hosted servers or NetScaler consoles. Notably, this means product activations and features require a significant amount of manual management.

Jose Augustin, senior director of product management at Citrix, noted this legacy setup has become an “operational slowdown for users”.

“Manual renewals, file management, and frequent outages tied to licensing issues have generated thousands of support cases every quarter,” he wrote.

“Modern Citrix licensing, with its cloud-based architecture, deeper insight through telemetry, and automated processes, will reduce risk and enable faster, more effective support.”

What the new Citrix licensing scheme offers

Under the new cloud-based License Activation Service (LAS), the firm said it aims to simplify customer experiences by “significantly reducing” operational overheads and automating the process.

This means customers won’t need to manually download, allocate, or manage license files, while entitlement updates will be automated.

“Entitlements are updated automatically in the background upon contract renewal, ensuring uninterrupted service,” Augustin wrote.

“Increased resiliency” was another key advantage touted by the firm. Under the LAS setup, license servers will no longer be a “single point of failure for users sessions” and improve environment stability.”

Looking forward, Augustin said the new LAS system will help the company gain deeper insights into product usage, which will support future R&D projects.

“We continuously gather anonymous, aggregated data on how our products are used,” he wrote. “This “always-on” data shapes our future roadmap, enabling us to deliver features and improvements that directly address your needs and pain points.

“This data-driven approach allows us to allocate our R&D investments more strategically, building higher quality products.”

What Citrix products are impacted?

In a separate advisory, Citrix noted that a raft of products will come under the LAS setup next year, including:

• Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops
• Citrix Provisioning (PVS)
• NetScaler
• XenServer
• Unicorn Scout

After the April 2026 deadline, Citrix warned these products will “stop recognizing file based licenses and will result in a loss of functionality and potential impacts on end-users”.

Exactly what this “loss of functionality” entails is yet to be revealed. ITPro has approached Citrix for clarification.

Augustin urged customers to engage with Citrix partners to help support the transition, adding that previous implementations of this licensing model have delivered improvements.

Since late 2024, Citrix has offered LAS support for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, for example. Augustin noted the firm has “seen hundreds of customers and partners move to utilize this offering with positive reception”.

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Citrix has issued patches for three new vulnerabilities in NetScaler Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and NetScaler Gateway products, warning that at least one is under active exploitation.

The cloud computing company has warned the flaws could allow attackers to carry out denial-of-service (DOS) attacks, access sensitive data, and potentially take control of affected systems.

CVE-2025-7775 has a CVSS score of 9.2, and is a memory overflow vulnerability leading to remote code execution and/or denial of service.

CVE-2025-7776, meanwhile, has a CVSS score of 8.8 and is a memory overflow vulnerability that leads to unpredictable or erroneous behavior and DDoS.

Finally, CVE-2025-8424, with a CVSS score of 8.7, allows improper access control on the NetScaler Management Interface.

The list of affected versions includes:

• NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway 14.1 versions before 14.1-47.48
• NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway 13.1, before 13.1-59.22.
• NetScaler ADC 13.1-FIPS and NDcPP, before 13.1-37.241-FIPS
• NetScaler ADC 12.1-FIPS and NDcPP, before 12.1-55.330-FIPS

These unsupported and end-of-life versions are believed to account for as many as one-in-five NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway installations.

“These flaws come as an unwelcome addition to the growing list documented in Citrix’s NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway products," said Conor Agnew, head of compliance at Closed Door Security.

"The most dangerous of these newly discovered flaws has received a critical rating, and allows a hacker to take control of or even crash a system remotely, making use of a memory overflow to wreck systems. Threat actors do not even need user credentials to carry out the attack."

Citrix flaws under active exploitation

Over the last few weeks, CVE‑2025‑7775 has already been targeted in zero-day attacks to deploy backdoors, Citrix said.

Caitlin Condon, VP of security research at VulnCheck, said that memory corruption vulnerabilities like CVE-2025-7775 and CVE-2025-7776 can be tricky to exploit, and tend to be used by state-sponsored or other skilled adversaries in targeted attacks, rather than more broadly leveraged by commodity attackers.

"While the Citrix advisory only explicitly mentions active exploitation of CVE-2025-7775, management interfaces for firewalls and security gateways have been targeted en masse in recent threat campaigns," she warned.

"It's likely that exploit chains targeting these vulnerabilities in the future may try to combine an initial access flaw like CVE-2025-7775 with a flaw like CVE-2025-8424 with management interface compromise as a goal."

Customers are advised to install the updated versions of NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway as soon as possible.

"Companies and governments need to be vigilant, and ensure they’re keeping all software up to date, and moving off of outdated and unsupported systems," said Agnew.

"Companies should reach out to their vendors while the security flaws are being reviewed by Citrix, to seek guidance and consult on best practices moving forward, especially in the event that companies are still on unsupported platforms.”

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Virtualization is the answer to rising hardware costs coming alongside a Windows 11 refresh, according to Citrix.

The firm is pushing a virtualization tool from Unicon following its acquisition of the endpoint operating system (OS) maker in January.

Writing in the Citrix blog, Philipp Benkler — former CEO of Unicon and now the vice president of product at Citrix — suggested the transition to Windows 11 meant companies were facing a hardware refresh at a time of increasing costs thanks to US tariffs.

"IT hardware prices are climbing fast — and they’re likely to stay high," Benkler wrote. "The April 2025 tariffs are already driving cost hikes, and experts suggest further increases could follow as supply chain pressures and upgrade demands mount."

The post adds to the growing pile of tech companies openly admitting that the Trump administration is having a negative impact on the American-led industry.

While Microsoft increased the price of its Xbox gaming consoles, it only vaguely pinned the blame on "market conditions and rising development costs”. Similarly, Amazon backed down from listing the specific cost of tariffs on every item it lists.

Others have been bolder, however. Last week, Apple said that tariffs will add $900 million to its costs in the next quarter while Nvidia has said it will incur a $5.5bn loss because of tightened export rules.

Solution to tariffs?

Regardless of who is to blame for rising prices, Benkler said tariffs are leading to "tough choices", with enterprises considering delaying upgrades, reducing headcounts, or finding novel ways to absorb rising costs.

Benkler said Unicon's eLux is an OS that uses whatever existing hardware a company has and transforms it into endpoints for virtualized environments, helping companies avoid "the hardware trap".

"With eLux, you don’t need to rip and replace your IT hardware to stay compliant or ready for Windows 11," he wrote. "Instead, you can extend the life of your existing endpoints and unlock modern features through our hardened OS."

On the networking front, Benkler points to Citrix NetScaler, which doesn't require a physical appliance as the software can be deployed in the cloud or existing data center infrastructure.

"By running NetScaler as software, organizations can expand or optimize network capabilities without the added cost and procurement delays associated with tariff-inflated hardware," he said.

Whether or not virtualization is the answer, companies face serious implications from Trump's tariffs, with experts predicting it could cut global IT spending in half over the next six months.

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Citrix has urged firms to apply new updates after the discovery of two vulnerabilities in its NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway products.

The two vulnerabilities, CVE-2023-6548 and CVE-2023-6549, come just months after the company struggled to contain the critical Citrix Bleed security flaw.

CVE-2023-6549 consists of a denial of service (DoS) vulnerability in the NetScaler ADC and Gateway appliances. With an 8.2 CVSS rating this flaw is judged to be a high-severity vulnerability that hackers can exploit if the appliance has been configured as a gateway or AAA virtual server.

A blog published by Citrix’s parent company, the Cloud Software Group, revealed the firm is aware of a “limited number of exploits of each vulnerability in the wild”. 

The company was unable to provide any mitigations or workarounds to this vulnerability, urging customers download and apply the permanent fixes available for NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway as soon as possible. 

The vulnerability CVE-2023-6548 is an authenticated remote code execution (RCE) exploit involving the management interface, classified as a 5.5 on the CVSS. 

The relatively low severity rating could reflect the fact that exploiting this vulnerability requires an authenticated attacker with low level privileges to have access to NetScaler IP (NSIP), Subnet IP (SNIP), or cluster management IP (CLIP) with access to the system’s management interface.

In addition to immediately installing the recommended builds, customers are advised to ensure they have not exposed the management interface on the public internet and instead use a private network to host the NetScaler management IP. 

A difficult period for Citrix only gets worse

CVE-2023-6548 and CVE-2023-6549 are the second and third vulnerabilities discovered in Citrix appliances over the previous four months, with 2024 picking up where a challenging 2023 left off.

A critical vulnerability in the NetScaler system that became known as Citrix Bleed, or CVE-2023-4966, was identified by the company on 10 October 2023.

This critical security flaw enabled threat actors to steal sensitive information through Citrix devices and received a 9.2 CVSS rating. 

The prevalence of NetScaler gateways used for single sign-on (SSO) and remote access systems for large enterprises meant this security flaw could have serious ramifications if widely exploited.

On 15 November 2023, ITPro reported ransomware gangs were still capitalizing on the flaw to target several high profile organizations, including Chinese bank ICBC, who reportedly paid a ransom in order to resume operations. 

CVE-2023-6548 and CVE-2023-6549 appear to be less dangerous vulnerabilities, with researchers at security firm Tenable, Satnam Narang and Scott Caveza, predicting they will not be as widely exploited as Citrix Bleed.

“The impact from these two new zero-day vulnerabilities is not expected to be as significant as Citrix Bleed. Nonetheless, organizations that do use these appliances in their networks should apply the available patches as soon as possible."

Chris Morgan, senior cyber threat intelligence analyst at security company ReliaQuest, said CVE-2023-6548 has the potential to be a significant vulnerability by virtue of the number of attackers who will try to exploit it.

“Of the two vulnerabilities, CVE-2023-6548, is likely to receive a significant amount of interest from threat actors. The vulnerability, a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability, can be exploited by an authenticated attacker with low privileges if they are able to access NetScaler IP (NSIP), Subnet IP (SNIP), or cluster management IP (CLIP) with access to the appliance’s management interface.”

Morgan predicted the number of attempts to exploit this vulnerability will increase considerably once a working proof of concept is published.

“The scale of exploitation of this issue is currently unclear, however will likely increase dramatically once a working proof of concept (PoC) is released; given the likely interest in these vulnerabilities, this will likely surface in the short-term (1- 3 months). Users are highly recommended to upgrade susceptible appliances that support these vulnerabilities. Additionally, ensuring logging adequately provides visibility of susceptible appliances, to assist with detection of suspicious activity.”

Citrix Bleed represents a “huge early Christmas present” for the cyber criminals who exploited the vulnerability and will likely continue to pose a potent threat globally in 2024, a security expert has told ITPro.

The vulnerability, which has affected hundreds of organizations globally since it was discovered in October 2023, claimed another victim this week after US telecoms firm Xfinity confirmed it had experienced a data breach.

Xfinity, which relies on Citrix for cloud services, revealed hackers gained unauthorized access to their internal systems between the 16th and 19th of October, and customers have been warned that “information was likely acquired”.

Though Xfinity had taken steps to patch systems following Citrix Bleed, a subsequent investigation found that threat actors had already taken advantage of the vulnerability prior to their updates.

The information acquired includes names, contact details, usernames, passwords, and even the last four digits of some social security numbers.

“We know that you trust Xfinity to protect your information, and we can’t emphasize enough how seriously we are taking this matter,” Xfinity said in a statement. 

“We remain committed to continue investing in technology, protocols and experts dedicated to helping to protect your data and keeping you, our customer, safe.”

Citrix Bleed continues to cause problems 

Despite the issuing of a patch, Citrix Bleed has remained problematic. The vulnerability allows threat actors to bypass multifactor authentication (MFA) and hijack authenticated sessions. 

That's why Xfinity is asking customers to set up their own two-factor or multi-factor authentications to help protect individual accounts at the ground level.

Akhtar said that the vulnerability is among the most disturbing and disruptive to emerge in recent years and will likely continue to cause problems for organizations well into 2024.

“Citrix is a huge provider of cloud computing services,” he said.

“It's used by 99% of the Fortune 100, and 98% of the Fortune 500. So any breach has the potential to allow cyber criminals access to hundreds of thousands of organizations across the globe.

"Xfinity is a perfect example of this. It’s the largest provider of cable internet access in the United States, meaning any breach could affect millions of Americans. In other words, the Citrix Bleed had the potential to be a huge early Christmas present for the cyber criminals who exploited the vulnerability."

A key concern in any breach of this kind, Akhtar added, is the potential domino effect it creates further down the supply chain. Previous breaches this year, such as the MOVEit breach, impacted hundreds of organizations globally.

This has spurred a heightened focus on supply chain security among many organizations, he added, with security practitioners remaining highly vigilant of potential threats.

“89% of companies have experienced a supplier risk event in the past five years and that’s in large part down to the interconnectedness of modern business” said Akhtar. 

“This breach is a perfect illustration of how an unpatched vulnerability in a supplier’s software has the potential to spiral out of control.”

Citrix Bleed still remains a pervasive security threat for organizations globally despite a patch for the vulnerability being issued more than a month ago. 

Analysis shows that threat actors are targeting vulnerable devices en-masse since news of the flaw broke in late October. 

A host of major organizations including aerospace giant Boeing, law firm Allen & Overy, and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) are all believed to have fallen victim to attacks as a result of the vulnerability.

In a blog post yesterday, security researcher Kevin Beaumont said notorious ransomware gang LockBit appears to have capitalized on the flaw to target several organizations.  

“Through data allowing the tracking of ransomware operators, it has been possible to track individual targets,” he said. “Recently, it has become clear they have been targeting a vulnerability in Citrix NetScaler, called CitrixBleed.”

“This has been done in a coordinated fashion amongst multiple LockBit operators — a strike team to break into organizations using CitrixBleed and then hold them to ransom.”

One of the victims, ICBC, reportedly paid a ransom in a bid to resume operations.

The attack on ICBC, which is one of the world’s largest banks, severely disrupted operations and prevented the bank from clearing trades. 

LockBit told Reuters the bank “paid a ransom, deal closed”.

Thousands have still not patched for Citrix Bleed 

Beaumont added that while a patch was issued on October 10, “around five thousands organizations” had still not installed the patch at the time of writing. 

The scale of the issue prompted CISA to issue a warning to potentially vulnerable organizations last week. The security agency urged organizations using Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway to remain vigilant and issue a patch immediately.  

CISA said it, along with international partners, were responding to “active, targeted exploitation” of the vulnerability. 

CitrixBleed: Everything you need to know 

CitrixBleed specifically affects NetScaler Gateway and NetScaler ADC products, and was first identified by Citrix in early October. 

Tracked as CVE-2023-4966, the vulnerability can be used to bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA) and hijack authenticated sessions. 

This would enable threat actors to perform additional attacks within an organization’s network and exfiltrate sensitive data. 

Security firm Mandiant revealed it had seen evidence of CVE-2023-4966 being exploited in the wild since the end of August. 

Recurring Citrix flaws 

This latest incident is not the first serious vulnerability discovered in Citrix products this year. 

In July, the company issued a warning over three serious vulnerabilities affecting both NetScaler Gateway and ADC.  

These included: 

• A remote code execution (RCE) flaw tracked as CVE-2023-3519
• A cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw tracked as CVE-2023-3466
• A privilege escalation flaw tracked as CVE-2023-3467list

Researchers at NCC Group also uncovered a concerning campaign of attacks against Citrix users in August in which the aforementioned RCE flaw (CVE-2023-3519) has been used to place web shells on vulnerable devices.  

Citrix has urged its customers to apply a security update that addresses a critical buffer flaw affecting its network devices, which would have allowed hackers to expose information and escalate attacks.

The vulnerability, known as Citrix Bleed, was first identified by the firm on 10 October in a security bulletin and tracked as CVE-2023-4966. At the time, the firm stated that attackers could use the flaw to steal sensitive information through Citrix devices.

It released a patch for the vulnerability to coincide with the post and notified customers and channel partners of the issue directly, but did not elaborate on the attack chain or provide further technical details.

On the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) national vulnerability database, CVE-2023-4966 was awarded a CVSS rating of 7.5 which equates to ‘high’ severity. However, Citrix itself has branded the flaw ‘critical’. 

NetScaler gateways are used for single sign-on (SSO) and play a key role across a large number of organizations including Fortune 500 firms.

“The Citrix Netscaler gateways are often used to manage remote access, including in the running of critical national infrastructure,” said Andy Hornegold, VP product at Intruder.

“This vulnerability looks like it only impacts on-premise instances as opposed to cloud-managed, so I’d expect it to impact organizations that typically run resources on-prem instead of favoring cloud-hosted tech.”

Earlier in October, Mandiant revealed it had seen evidence of CVE-2023-4966 being exploited in the wild since the end of August. 

The security firm warned the flaw could be used to bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA) and hijack authenticated sessions, enabling threat actors to perform further attacks and exfiltrate sensitive data.

“The authenticated session hijacking could then result in further downstream access based upon the permissions and scope of access that the identity or session was permitted,” researchers wrote. 

“A threat actor could utilize this method to harvest additional credentials, laterally pivot, and gain access to additional resources within an environment.”

How do attackers exploit Citrix Bleed?

Though few technical details were known at the time of the bulletin, researchers from security firm Assetnote have since published a proof-of-concept for the vulnerability and posted a script to GitHub for others to replicate their results.

Assetnote conducted analysis on 13.1-48.47 and 13-49.15 to compare which functions Citrix had changed through the patch. They discovered two standout functions had been changed, ‘ns_aaa_oauth_send_openid_config’ and ‘ns_aaa_oauthrp_send_openid_config’, which are used for OpenID Connect Discovery through which identity information is checked and sent.

In this case, the functions were combined with the ‘snprintf’ function to create a JSON payload containing the user’s device hostname. Prior to the patch, this was performed near instantaneously, but post-patch the function was found to only send responses with a value of less than 20,000 bytes.

Values in excess of this would cause a buffer overflow containing data from memory, such as a session token.

The researchers found that the data inserted into the payload was drawn from the header for the HTTP ‘ost’, and that this was consistently inserted six times. Using this knowledge, they found that if they inserted a hostname of ‘a’ repeated 24,812 times using the unpatched version they received a response containing a 32-65 byte hex string-  a session token.

Attackers could use the same methodology to draw session tokens and perform further malicious activity through the impersonation of authenticated users.

Which versions of Citrix are vulnerable and what can I do?

In its advisory, Citrix stated the following NetScaler Gateway and ADC versions are affected by the flaw, which cannot be mitigated:

• 14.1 before 14.1-8.50
• 13.1 before 13.1-49.15
• 13.0 before 13.0-92.19

Additionally, NetScaler ADC FIPS versions 13.1 before 13.1-37.164, 12.1 before 12.1-55.300, and 12.1-NDcPP before 12.1-55.300 are vulnerable to the flaw. Official Citrix advice is to update to new versions as soon as possible.

Citrix added that those on NetScaler Gateway and ADC version 12.1 should upgrade their license as this version has reached end-of-life (EOL) and will receive no further support.

This is not the first high-profile flaw to be found in Citrix products this year.

In July, Citrix issued a warning to its NetScaler Gateway and ADC users over three new vulnerabilities: a remote code execution (RCE) flaw tracked as CVE-2023-3519, a cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw tracked as CVE-2023-3466, and a privilege escalation flaw tracked as CVE-2023-3467.

Another widespread campaign against Citrix users was uncovered in August by researchers at NCC Group and its subsidiary Fox-IT. They found that attackers had exploited CVE-2023-3519 to place web shells on vulnerable devices that persisted through subsequent patches and reboots.

At the time of publishing the report, the authors noted that 1,828 NetScaler products still contained backdoors and urged IT teams to seriously consider whether they had been compromised.

Researchers have found an expansive and active threat campaign that exploited a severe Citrix NetScaler vulnerability to backdoor thousands of devices, including those that were subsequently patched.

Attackers automated the exploitation of the remote code execution vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-3519, to place web shells on vulnerable devices. These were found to persist through patches and reboots.

Approximately 69% of the backdoored NetScalers were no longer vulnerable to CVE-2023-3519 at the time of their discovery, prompting researchers to warn administrators who have already dealt with the Citrix patch not to be lulled into a false sense of security.

The campaign was brought to light by NCC Group and its subsidiary Fox-IT, in collaboration with the Dutch Institute of Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD).

Both organizations had been looking into Citrix’s NetScaler Gateway vulnerabilities to establish evidence of exploitation in the wild, which led them to uncover dormant web shells. 

In response, the two collaborated on a scan of internet-exposed NetScalers. 

Researchers had initially limited their focus to devices that had not been patched at the time of Citrix’s initial disclosure, but upon widening the scan to include patched devices were shocked to discover more than 2,000 IP addresses that had been backdoored with the web shell.

The campaign is believed to have been launched between 20 and 21 July, at which time approximately 31,127 NetScalers were still vulnerable to CVE-2023-3519.

NCC Group stated that as of 14 August, 1,828 NetScalers still contained backdoors out of a total 1,952 devices that the teams identified as compromised.

The DIVD reached out to affected organizations starting on 10 August. Devices in Germany, France, and Switzerland ranked the highest for compromise out of the affected countries, with the vast majority of NetScalers that were backdoored being located in Europe.

Citrix issued a bulletin in July in which it disclosed three vulnerabilities affecting NetScaler Gateway and ADC products. The firm urged customers with affected devices to install the latest updates.

CVE-2023-3519 was the worst of the three, carrying a near-maximum CVSSv3 score of 9.8 and allowing hackers to perform remote code execution.

NCC Group advised admins to perform a vigorous scan of the known indicators of compromise (IOCs) on their NetScaler devices even if they had applied the July patch. 

Fox-IT has made a Python script for performing triage on NetScalers publicly available via its GitHub repository, and Mandiant has similarly published a bash script that checks for IOCs.

Researchers advised IT teams to treat any evidence of the web shell having been used with the utmost seriousness and recommended that in this circumstance a wider investigation should be undertaken to rule out lateral attacks throughout an organization’s IT environment. 

ITPro has approached Citrix for more information.

Citrix has issued a warning to users of NetScaler Gateway and ADC products over a series of new vulnerabilities. 

In a security bulletin, the firm disclosed three new vulnerabilities, including one believed to have been actively exploited in the wild. 

This included CVE-2023-3466, a reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability, and CVE-2023-3467, which would enable escalation of privilege to root administrator, the firm revealed in its update. 

The most severe of the three - identified as CVE-2023-3519 - would allow for unauthenticated remote code execution on affected Gateway appliances.

Analysis of the flaw from Rapid7 found that this vulnerability is “known to be exploited in the wild” and urged users to patch immediately. 

“This product line is a popular target for attackers of all skill levels, and we expect that exploitation will increase quickly,” researchers said. 

“Rapid7 strongly recommends updating to a fixed version on an emergency basis, without waiting for a typical patch cycle to occur. See the Citrix advisory for more information.”

Security firm Tenable also analyzed the most severe flaw, which was given a severity score of 9.8 on the CVSSv3 scale, adding that although exploits have been observed, there is currently no known proof of concept code circulating in the wild.

Affected products

 In its advisory, Citrix confirmed several versions of NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway are affected by the vulnerabilities. These include: 

• NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway 13.1 before 13.1-49.13
• NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway 13.0 before 13.0-91.13
• NetScaler ADC 13.1-FIPS before 13.1-37.159
• NetScaler ADC 12.1-FIPS before 12.1-65.36
• NetScaler ADC 12.1-NDcPP before 12.65.36

The advisory added that NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway version 12.1 is now end-of-life (EOL) and thus vulnerable to the recently-disclosed flaws. 

Customers currently using an EOL version have been advised to upgrade devices to the latest software versions with the patches applied.

These include: 

• NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway 13.1-49.13  and later releases
• NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway 13.0-91.13  and later releases of 13.0
• NetScaler ADC 13.1-FIPS 13.1-37.159 and later releases of 13.1-FIPS
• NetScaler ADC 12.1-FIPS 12.1-65.36 and later releases of 12.1-FIPS
• NetScaler ADC 12.1-NDcPP 12.1-65.36 and later releases of 12.1-NDcPP

Customers and channel partners have been notified about the ongoing security risks, and will continue to receive updates via Citrix’s security bulletins. 

Citrix has named board chairman Bob Calderoni as interim CEO and president, replacing David Henshall, who had held both roles since 2017.

The changes will take effect "immediately", the company said in a statement, which also thanked Henshall for his service.

Henshall's tenure at the company covered its transition to the cloud and "significant" improvements to products and SaaS offerings, the firm said. His work was also "instrumental" in helping the company and its employees navigate the pandemic. He has also held CFO and COO roles since joining the company in 2003.

"The entire Board thanks him for his contributions over nearly 20 years," said Calderoni.

"We remain focused on transitioning the business to SaaS as we work to securely deliver a unified work experience for our valued customers. I look forward to leading the company into its next phase of growth and success, and I am confident that this will be a smooth leadership transition."

Calderoni brings over 30 years of executive experience in the technology sector, including seven as a director of Citrix. He has previously worked as interim CEO, holding the position from 2015 to 2016, before Henshall's appointment. The company's lead independent director, Nanci Caldwell, called him a "natural choice" to lead the Company at this time.

"Bob knows our products, markets, customers and culture," Caldwell said. "The board is confident he is the right person to drive the company's continued transformation and deliver value to our shareholders."

In a final note, Henshall also praised Calderoni, referring to him as a "strong leader" who is deeply familiar with Citrix.

"I'm incredibly proud of what we've accomplished together and confident that the company will continue to innovate and deliver for all stakeholders under Bob's leadership," said Henshall.

There were further changes at board level, with Dr Ajei Gopal departing the company after four-years. This was to avoid any potential conflicts of interest that could arise due to him holding both president and CEO positions at another company, Ansys, where Calderoni is also a board member.

Citrix is considering finding a buyer for itself to rejuvenate its fortunes after a shaky 2021 in which its share price has fallen to levels not recorded since mid-2019.

The virtualisation and workplace collaboration software firm is working with advisers to consider the benefits and drawbacks of selling itself, according to Bloomberg, with plans to approach potential buyers within weeks.

A final decision hasn’t been made on whether to proceed with a sale, regardless of whether the company finds a buyer, however. Citrix might also yet remain a standalone firm.

The firm has, in recent months, struggled to capitalise on a catalogue of successes over the last couple of years, with share prices dropping sharply in April 2021. Citrix encountered supply chain issues in the first three months of the year, which led to the company missing its revenue targets.

These supply chain issues affected hardware shipments and the company also generated a lower-than-expected duration of on-premise licenses. This is despite the company handling a much higher demand for its software and services during the pandemic than Citrix otherwise would have expected.

Exemplifying this decline was the fact its flagship Workspace suite of tools and services recorded declining year-on-year revenues of 11%, while its app delivery and security revenues also fell by 6% against the first three months of 2020.

It was a similar story for the second quarter of the year, with shares falling further thanks to a “mixed” financial performance. CEO David Henshall pinned these difficulties on “sales execution challenges” caused by complexity in managing a rapid transition to the cloud among customers while managing different license model types.

The company has also had to endure a rocky few months due to a string of security issues, most notably in May 2019 in which an attack saw hackers seize 6TB of sensitive data. Since then, there have been a number of minor incidents, with cyber criminals taking advantage of flaws in Citrix systems.

The potential move comes after Elliot Management recently took more than a $1 billion stake in Citrix, as of last week, according to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

The firm has previously explored the option of selling itself in 2017, Bloomberg adds, although discussion with potential buyers stalled at the time due to differences in opinion over the valuation of the company.

Citrix has yet to respond to IT Pro's request for comment.

COVID-19 and its effects have dominated our thoughts, dictated our actions and reshaped our lives in ways we could never have imagined. Grappling with the impact of the pandemic has taken a collective, concerted effort and all our ingenuity.

But with our attention fixed on one crisis, we’ve forgotten the rapid escalation of another. Catastrophes don’t wait in queues and the climate emergency only grows more critical day by day. 2020 has already shown us the desperate consequences of our global warming inaction, with the IFRC responding to a record number of climate disasters in the Asia Pacific and Arctic sea ice shrinking to the second-lowest levels on record over the summer.

The climate crisis will have even more devastating consequences than coronavirus but because these consequences aren’t as immediately visible, we think they won’t occur. This thinking isn’t just flawed, it’s fatal, and if we want to protect the planet, we need to replicate the energy and urgency we saw when tackling coronavirus.

The power of technology

Technology will and is having a huge part to play in responding to global warming, at both macro and micro levels. Indeed, important climate action and innovation have been occurring already - we just need to be intentional about embracing these new ideas and pushing them even further.

Lowering the costs of renewable energy has had a great impact, especially as it makes them an attractive alternative to oil and gas. Tech advancements have also helped cut carbon emissions too. Electric cars are gaining more and more traction, and are helping reduce our reliance on polluting petrol and diesel. The spread of cloud technology is also helping businesses transform their processes and go paperless, although more work must be done to ensure the large amount of energy needed to power large data centres is drawn from renewable energy sources. Individual choices may seem insignificant on their own, but their collective impact is immense.

Yet it would be a mistake to pin all our hopes on technology alone. Innovation is great but, by itself, it won’t save us from the consequences of historic climate inaction. What’s needed is a simultaneous innovation in our thinking; a cultural transformation where we each recognise the critical role we play in responding to the climate crisis and make an unshakeable commitment to radical sustainability. We need to see this cultural transformation within governments, within businesses of every sector and within ourselves.

A little less conversation

It’s easy to say the right things, but change only happens with action, which is why our company’s setting ambitious, concrete targets to track and reduce our environmental footprint, aiming to become the first carbon-neutral IT distributor by 2022. Practically, this means changing our ERP system and moving to the cloud, cutting down business travel, encouraging working from home to reduce employee travel and choosing electrical-based heating for our offices, over gas options. This is by no means a finite list; we know we need to be continually searching for new, sustainable ways of doing things as part of our commitment to the earth and to each other.

The wider business community isn’t doing enough to tackle climate change, however. There’s no point in all of us working hard to maximise our salaries and our business profits if we end up killing our planet off in the process. Traditional business thinking wasn’t sustainability-friendly at all, and indeed, back in 1970 the world-famous economist Milton Friedman argued it was the “sole” purpose of business to generate profits for its shareholders. We’ve come a long way since then, and we now recognise the value to the reputation of a business and trustworthiness from being seen to adopt good sustainability goals. Our customers want and expect this. Businesses today need to adopt the same focus on sustainability as it does profits.

Playing out part

Much of our inspiration also comes from our vendor partners, with a large number of them having developed technologies solutions that many would rely on to reduce their carbon footprint. In addition, guiding our reseller partners on how they can decarbonise their businesses is of huge importance to us. We’ve established an IT industry-based community called Techies Go Green, which aims to build awareness while informing the public on what tech firms are doing to tackle climate change.

We’re also helping partners take action by signing up to a ‘three-year carbon pledge’, the goal of which being to achieve carbon neutrality within three years. This is bold, not not as difficult as you may think. It starts with each business measuring their own carbon footprint and once they know where their emissions are coming from, they can then identify the positive actions necessary to reduce them. Based on initial discussions with partners, nearly everyone we talked to was willing to sign up to become a member of the community, which is hugely encouraging. It shows the industry is taking steps forward as one.

Coronavirus has been devastating but it’s also shown us how much is possible through working collaboratively and how quickly we can adapt our behaviour to help protect others. The climate crisis is no different, even though the challenge is much bigger. We are at an early stage where the awareness and realisation of the need to take action is recognised, but meaningful actions haven’t really started yet. We can still slow down global warming, but we’ll need urgency, accountability and sustained commitment to achieve it. And each one of us must play our part.

Michael O'Hara is group managing director at DataSolutions

Citrix has issued a patch for XenMobile, after a security researcher at Positive Technologies spotted a vulnerability in the enterprise mobility management system.

According to researcher Andrey Medov, the flaw in the server component could let attackers read files, including configuration files and encryption keys.

"Exploitation of this vulnerability allows hackers to obtain information that can be useful for breaching the perimeter, as the configuration file often stores domain account credentials for LDAP access," explained Medov, referring to lightweight directory access protocol, servers that are mainly used for central storage of accounts.

"With access to the domain account, a remote attacker can use the obtained data for authentication on other external company resources, including corporate mail, VPN, and web applications."

Medov adds: "Worse still, an attacker who has managed to read the configuration file can access sensitive data, such as database passwords — local PostgreSQL by default and a remote SQL Server database in some cases."

There's no reason to panic, though, as victims would need to follow a malicious link first and the attacker would need some physical access. "However, taking into account that the database is stored inside the corporate perimeter and cannot be accessed from the outside, this attack vector can only be used in complex attacks, for example, with the involvement of an insider accomplice," Medov explained.

The vulnerability is in versions 10.8 to 10.12 of Citrix XenMobile, also called Citrix Endpoint Management, but not in the cloud versions of the system. If your system is at risk, the company is urging users to update their software. The level of risk depends on the version, with Citrix advising some to update immediately, while advising others they can update as part of their regular patching schedule.

The patch addresses the flaw spotted by Medov as well as a handful of related vulnerabilities reported by Glyn Wintle of Tradecraft and Kristian Bremberg of Detectify, Citrix said.

Last year, Positive Technologies spotted a critical vulnerability in Citrix software that affected 80,000 companies, but a survey six weeks later revealed one in five of those companies still hadn't patched the flaw.

Savvy hackers have been crawling the web in an attempt to target corporate networks impacted by the recently disclosed vulnerabilities in Citrix systems.

Earlier this month, Citrix announced it discovered multiple vulnerabilities in Citrix ADC, Citrix Gateway and Citrix SD-WAN WANOP appliance models 4000-WO, 4100-WO, 5000-WO and 5100-WO.

Shortly after the announcement was made, hackers attempted to exploit the vulnerabilities to gain access to Citrix’s application delivery controller systems. To do so, hackers exploited the vulnerabilities of CVE-2020-8195 and CVE-2020-8196 in Citrix ADC, Citrix Gateway and Citrix SD-WAN WANOP.

Johannes Ullrich, head of research at the SANS Technology Institute, used a honey pot setup to track hackers taking advantage of the Citrix vulnerabilities.

“As of today, my F5 honeypot is getting hit by attempts to exploit two of the Citrix vulnerabilities disclosed this week,” Ullrich said in a post published by the SANS Technology Institute.

“It is not clear exactly which CVE was assigned to which vulnerability, but the possible candidates are CVE-2020-8195, CVE-2020-8196,” he continued.

According to Ullrich, hackers used the vulnerabilities for arbitrary file downloads and to retrieve PCI-DSS reports from Citrix.

Citrix has since patched the vulnerabilities identified in its Citrix ADC, Citrix Gateway, and Citrix SD-WAN WANOP. This included patching CVE-2020-8195 and CVE-2020-8196 as well.

CISO Citrix CISO Fermin J. Serna explained, however: “We are limiting the public disclosure of many of the technical details of the vulnerabilities and the patches to further protect our customers. Across the industry, today’s sophisticated malicious actors are using the details and patches to reverse engineer exploits.

"As such, we are taking steps to advise and help our customers but also do what we can to shield intelligence from malicious actors.”

Several hackers have attempted to target and exploit Citrix ADC in the past few months. In March, reports revealed the state-sponsored APT41 group targeted Citrix NetScaler/ADC, Cisco routers, and Zoho ManageEngine Desktop Central products to attack 75 customers between Jan. 20 and March 11.

Finastra experienced a ransomware attack targeting its Citrix ADC servers in March, exploiting the CVE-2019-1978 vulnerability as a potential attack vector.

ShareFile used to be one of the more expensive cloud services, but Citrix recently cut its pricing substantially, making it now one of the best-value platforms around. The Standard plan costs just £38 per month for five users, with additional users costing an extra £8 a month per head. The price gets you unlimited cloud storage with support for massive file sizes up to 100GB, along with business-class features including custom portal branding, free mobile apps and two-factor authentication.

When you sign up, Citrix also creates a custom subdomain for your account. Give this the same name as your company and it creates a nicely professional impression when sharing links with clients and customers.

For more demanding businesses, the Advanced plan starts at £60 per month for five users, and includes encrypted Outlook and Gmail plugins, feedback and approval workflows and integration with Office 365.

Then there’s the Premium plan, which starts at £95 and adds security measures such as e-signatures – while the Enterprise plan comes with bespoke pricing tailored to your company, and allows you to use on-premises or cloud storage zones for file sharing. If you just want to take ShareFile for a spin, you can also take advantage of a free five-user, 30-day trial of any of the standard plans.

Once you’re registered, the web portal provides quick access to ShareFile’s various online features. The dashboard is pretty sparse, providing only four widgets showing your favourite folders, recent file activity, shortcuts to common tasks and access to video tutorials. To see cloud storage usage, you’ll need to run a storage zone report. Still, there’s no denying that it’s easy to navigate.

Licensed users are set up on the system as “employees”, each with a personal folder. You can also optionally give various privileges to employees, such as user management, accessing other users’ folders and managing the company account.

Employees can then use their own customised web portal to view and create personal or shared folders, and mark any as favourites by clicking on the star icon next to them. They can also access a personal File Box, a temporary store where files are held for 180 days – although for longer retention you can always move these items to permanent folders.

For sharing files outside of your organisation, you can create “client” accounts for consultants and the like, allowing them to make use of basic collaboration facilities. Clients don’t count against your licences, but they can only access folders they have been expressly invited to.

Alternatively, users can share individual files directly from the desktop app, Outlook plugin or web portal. The invitee receives an email – branded with your own portal graphic – containing a link that directs them to the cloud-stored file. Similarly, you can also ask anyone, including those without a ShareFile account, to send you a file: employees can easily create an email request, which invites the recipient to pick a local file and send it to a specified ShareFile folder.

Another feather in Citrix’s cap is its good integration with other business apps. We were pleased to note that it works with Fujitsu’s ScanSnap devices for scanning documents directly to cloud folders, while the Citrix Files iOS app, running on our iPad, allowed us to browse our personal folders, send and request files, send photos directly to a cloud folder and edit shared Office documents on the move.

ShareFile’s web portal isn’t as well designed or as feature-rich as many competitors’, but overall Citrix delivers slick collaboration features at a great price, with a solid set of user management options and best-in-class support for outsized files.

Server virtualization is a technology that has gained in popularity thanks to both the possibility to increase compute capacity in an unchanged physical space and the changing demands of business.

Where in the past additional physical servers might have been added to cope with the workload, businesses are taking advantage of the compute capacity of modern hardware to virtualize more than one server on a single physical device.

Server virtualization is the process of creating a virtual version of a physical entity. In the case of server virtualization, the physical server is virtually split into multiple servers. Each virtual server is isolated but shares the physical hardware and can perform all the tasks associated with a traditional server.

Also known as virtual machines (VMs), the technology is becoming more widely used as businesses better understand how the technology can increase the efficiency of their servers while keeping costs down and avoiding over-capacity in hardware.

Additionally, VMs offer IT teams a greater degree of flexibility. Staff can be allotted additional compute or storage capacity without dealing with physical infrastructure. VMs can also be called upon at very short notice without requiring time-consuming hardware set-up and configuration, or even finding space in a rack.

The importance of this flexibility was made abundantly clear throughout the COVID-19 pandemic as organizations were forced to make significant changes to their IT infrastructure at very short notice.

As digital transformation continues around the globe, server virtualization will continue to become more important to the modern economy.

What is server virtualization?

Server virtualization is essentially the process of creating a computer within a computer. A host machine simulates another self-contained device within it, attaching virtual core components such as the CPU, memory and storage, and operating systems. These processes, or applications, running on the VM don’t affect the host machine nor other VMs, beyond leaning on its storage and compute resources.

The technology has many applications; for example, Linux-based operating systems can create a Windows VM to run programs only compatible with Windows. The isolated nature of VMs means that cyber security researchers can test malware in a controlled environment without risking the contamination of essential services.

For server applications, however, the primary benefit is that of efficiency. By using a single server to host multiple VMs, multiple different programmes can be run in tandem, with different operating systems and resource allocations if necessary. This gives IT departments increased flexibility, as well as greater control over cost.

Using a virtual server also means that IT staff have much more transparency, using a single dashboard for viewing all operations and workloads, identifying consumptions and tweaking workloads where necessary for totally seamless performance.

What is a hypervisor?

Even if you're not familiar with server virtualization technology, you're almost certainly familiar with the biggest provider of it: industry stalwarts VMware. The company offers various flavours of virtualization management technologies, with its best-known offering being the ESXi hypervisor.

Hypervisors are the systems that manage the guest machines running as a VM, and sit on the host machine to oversee these operations. Bare-metal (also known as native) hypervisors sit directly on a server with no underlying OS and are exemplified by the aforementioned ESXi, as well as Microsoft's Hyper-V software and Oracle VM Server.

Hosted hypervisors are a separate kind of system, which sit on top of a standard operating system and run VMs with a layer of abstraction between the host OS and the guest machine. These are generally chosen for desktop machines as pre-packaged applications, used for running incompatible software, as they are more user-friendly and present less of a learning curve than bare-metal hypervisors.

The benefits of server virtualization

The main benefit of server virtualization is efficiency, both in terms of physical hardware usage and team productivity.

Hardware and infrastructure costs can be reduced by running multiple servers on a single appliance. Different applications can also be run in tandem and isolation, with different operating systems and resource allocations if necessary.

Server virtualization allows for considerably more versatility than physical servers from a resource standpoint. Depending on resource availability, memory, compute, and storage can be scaled up and down based on the current business need without requiring lengthy and expensive hardware reconfiguration.

Although many physical servers can boast powerful processors and substantial memory, these aren’t always correctly utilized. They can be seen as almost wasteful unless constantly tasked with appropriate workloads.

However, dividing the resources between virtual servers means it can be spread between multiple environments and help the physical device run more efficiently. In this way, it's possible to use the same amount of processing power to run multiple workloads simultaneously without negatively impacting performance.

Moreover, by investing in virtual servers, organizations can also free up physical space as well as limit the number of separate pieces of hardware which need to be managed by the IT department, allowing the team to focus on more important tasks, such as protecting the business against new cyber security threats.

Virtual servers also make it easier to manage data backup and recovery since everything required to run a given application is held in the virtualized image, down to the operating system.

Lastly, server virtualization is more financially efficient: if a business wants to significantly overhaul its legacy infrastructure by moving towards digital transformation, a virtualized environment offers a quick way to quickly upscale or downscale resources. It avoids the need to invest heavily upfront, meaning expenses can be re-assigned to other parts of the business, or even eradicated in some cases.

What effect can server virtualization have on a business?

Server virtualization can have benefits for the entire organization. Rather than needing to permanently onboard new employees to deal with enhanced IT resources, contractors can be used to establish VMs on a project-by-project basis. Upon completion, these VMs can be taken back down in order to not consume any more resources or budget.

Furthermore, if a company wants to explore new applications or services, these can be installed on virtual servers rather than taking up space on physical hardware. If it's decided that an application is not suitable for the business need, it can be uninstalled, and the virtual server can quickly be deleted.

Providers and vendors are now supplying the tools businesses need to set up their own virtualized resources. VMware's virtual servers, Dell's blade servers, and Citrix's virtual software and desktop tools are all making it easier for companies to move towards a virtualized infrastructure and freeing themselves from the legacy server chains.

Finally, it is no surprise that the major cloud vendors - such as AWS or Azure - have virtual servers in their product line-up. While some applications require a dedicated bare-metal server, simply selecting compute, memory, and storage needs to create a virtualized server in a private or public cloud is a clear demonstration of the flexibility possible through a virtual server approach.

When the European Union first announced the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) huge concerns bubbled for a few years before coming to a head just before 25 May 2018. This near-hysteria was fuelled by the spectre of massive fines, as well as an underlying sense of mystery around how it would affect companies and business processes.

12 months on, however, organisations by-and-large have come to learn that many of the urban myths spread before the GDPR watershed (that regulators would simply scale up fines, for example) have not come to pass. Rather, the consensus has settled in more positive territory; for Citrix's chief digital risk officer, Peter Lefkowitz, GDPR has worked much better as an accountability framework than people had expected.

"For a long time, in Europe, we had national implementing of laws on the [previous] directive, we had filings, we had different permissions to obtain in different places," he tells IT Pro. "The move to a framework where you need to know what data you're collecting, how you're using it, which vendors you're using to oversight, it gets us back to a manageable place.

"What I've been interested to see is that the privacy community and the business community, for all of the effort that went in, have taken to it pretty well. And people are happier with a more standards-based way of proceeding."

Compliance is a process and doesn't happen overnight

Research done since GDPR came into force shows a significant portion of organisations still don't consider themselves to be compliant with the toughest set of data protection laws drafted to date. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), meanwhile, has been adamant that it wouldn't seek to punish businesses following an incident provided they have shown willingness and co-operation with the new regulations.

Certainly, the endeavour to comply isn't just a matter of flicking a switch or ticking a box, rather it's a continuous process that companies would have to remain engaged in for the foreseeable future. Lefkowitz tells IT Pro the most interesting part for Citrix is how GDPR compliance has become part of the company's daily routine and changed its businesses processes.

For example, for all product releases the company now demands the use of a structured privacy tool configured in a particular way. The product manager will fill out a questionnaire with the legal team and respond to queries they ask about the product, such as what it does, who the lead might be, and a series of questions probing subjects around privacy, patents, security, open source, export controls and other factors.

This ongoing GDPR compliance process may manifest in different ways for different businesses and in varying industries too, but by-and-large the altered business practices adhere to the same principles underpinned by the year-old laws.

Downplay the role of privacy at your peril

For all the positives of GDPR that compliant businesses have inadvertently benefitted from, including better protection against data breaches, among the most surprising for Lefkowitz has been the role of privacy in boosting brand value.

"I have learned how important privacy is to our brand; how important it is to our community," he says. "The trust equation there is very important. In a time when privacy is on the front page of the papers every day, our customers want to know that we and other companies that they're dealing with are focused on these issues and managing them well."

This was not a visible issue five years ago, or even three years ago, and GDPR has done that in-part. Of course, this is also possible given the multitude of scandals that have adorned front pages in the last 12 months, from Google to Facebook, lending privacy a heigher level of awareness in the public consciousness.

Just as privacy holds importance, so does security. This is something Citrix has been forced to learn the hard way, following its catastrophic data breach disclosed earlier this year. Hackers accessed 6TB worth of corporate documentation and staff members' personal data after infiltrating the company's systems and lingering for up to six months undetected. As a direct consequence of disclosing this breach, as required under GDPR, the company's share price fell sharply and hasn't quite recovered since.

For what it's worth Lefkowitz, who was closely involved in the response and internal investigation, says Citrix has learnt its lessons and that every employee at the company is more vigilant of security than they were three months ago. Meanwhile, investigations are ongoing and the company has been co-operating with the FBI, although regulatory action may follow a little later down the line.

We're still in the dark over GDPR enforcement

There has been a fluttering of enforcement action in the last year, occasionally stealing headlines. It's inescapable to associate the likes of Google and Facebook either with the large fines that have been levied, or ongoing investigations. The former, for instance, has been hit with the biggest GDPR fine to date, courtesy of French data protection authorities, while the Irish data regulator is running at least ten concurrent investigations into Mark Zuckerberg's social media empire.

But most of the action we've seen, Lefkowitz points out, involves mistakes and bad practices prior to 25 May. Incidentally, on the cusp of GDPR's first anniversary, the Irish regulator announced a fresh probe into Google's practices.

"I don't think we really have a sense yet of what enforcement's going to look like under the GDPR," he continues. "There've been some breaches reported, there have been some incidents that governments have looked into. But we haven't yet seen the big, ugly case that has come out of actions that happened after May of 2018."

This, along with other aspects of the legislation and how it's enforced, may not be clear for at least a year or two. As Lefkowitz puts it: "The ink's not dry on practice under GDPR". These factors include not just the issue of de-identification but the yet-to-be-finalised ePrivacy Regulation, which seems to be in the European Union's equivalent of development hell'.

"There are a number of topics that it's going to take a year or two to shake out. It's going to be interesting to see whether a 100-page law will be adaptable as computing and our interaction with devices and data change. We just don't know the answer to that yet."

Established in Richardson, Texas, in 1989 by Ed Iacobucci, a former IBM developer, Citrix started as a trailblazer in virtualization and remote access solutions. Over the years, the company has expanded its reach and influence, becoming a worldwide authority in digital workspace and cloud services. This growth has been fueled by navigating major industry shifts, undertaking numerous acquisitions, and forming key strategic alliances.

Today, Citrix operates as part of the Cloud Software Group, following its historic $16.5 billion acquisition by Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital in 2022. The company further solidified its market position through a 2024 partnership with Microsoft, placing it at the leading edge of enterprise virtualization, cloud technologies, and secure digital workspace solutions. Citrix’s extensive portfolio now covers virtualization, cloud computing, networking, and software as a service (SaaS), all underpinned by a legacy of innovation and strategic investment.

Citrix delivers various services, including virtualization, storage, networking, software as a service, and cloud computing. Its journey has been marked by a dynamic history, featuring multiple acquisitions, financial peaks, and occasional market challenges.

Below, we’ll delve into Citrix’s history, its current product offerings, and its vision for the future of digital workspaces.

A brief history of Citrix

Citrix’s story began in 1989, when Ed Iacobucci, formerly of IBM, launched Citra in Richardson, Texas. Following a trademark issue, the company was rebranded as Citrix, a name inspired by combining “Citra” with “UNIX,” highlighting its early commitment to UNIX-based technologies.

A cornerstone of Citrix’s early success was its strategic partnership with Microsoft, where it licensed its technology to create remote access tools for Microsoft operating systems. This collaboration proved crucial for Citrix’s expansion and continues to underpin its business strategy to this day.

During the 1990s, Citrix emerged as a leader in thin client and remote access solutions, enabling users to connect to servers and resources through specialized devices. The company went public in 1995 and saw revenue climb as demand for remote work technologies grew. Citrix further broadened its expertise through key acquisitions, such as ExpertCity, which introduced remote desktop solutions, and Sequoia Software, which strengthened its virtualization capabilities.

In recent years, Citrix has undergone a major transformation, marked by significant investments and acquisitions. In 2022, private equity firms Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital acquired Citrix for $16.5 billion. Citrix subsequently merged with TIBCO Software to form Cloud Software Group, which now oversees Citrix’s wide-ranging portfolio of digital workspace, virtualization, and cloud solutions.

Since the acquisition, Citrix has continued to innovate within Cloud Software Group, rolling out new features and enhancements across its digital workspace and cloud platforms. Notable updates include advanced management tools for app layers, improved security for cloud images, and expanded customization for user notifications. The company has also streamlined its partner programs and license distribution, aiming for greater standardization and efficiency as it adapts to evolving enterprise IT needs.

What does Citrix sell?

Citrix built its name as a leader in virtualization, providing solutions that allow businesses to create virtual versions of hardware, operating systems, storage, networks, and more. Flagship offerings like Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops give IT control over virtual machines, apps, licensing, and security, while enabling anywhere access.

The company expanded into networking, delivering products like Citrix Web App Firewall, Citrix Gateway, Citrix Application Delivery Management, and Citrix SD-WAN. These tools ensure reliable, secure application and data access across networks and clouds, whether in a data centre, branch office, or on mobile.

Citrix transitioned some of its virtualization strengths into the cloud, providing software-as-a-service tools like Citrix DaaS that enable simplified management of secure cloud desktops and apps.

The company also offers cloud computing capabilities through Citrix Cloud, a platform that connects resources across chosen on-prem, public cloud, or hybrid environments.

On the workspace side, Citrix Workspace app and digital workspace solutions aim to deliver unified access to apps, desktops, and content from any device. Content Collaboration is Citrix's file sync and sharing product, helping businesses share content on-premise and in the cloud with other collaborators, such as colleagues and clients.

Citrix has also ventured into providing secure access service edge (SASE) solutions, which integrate networking and security functions in the cloud to support secure access needs across an increasingly distributed workforce. Citrix Secure Internet Access and Citrix Secure Workspace Access are part of this portfolio, offering secure, high-performance access to applications and data regardless of where they are hosted.

To bolster its secure workspace solutions, Citrix integrates advanced analytics through offerings like Citrix Analytics for Security, which proactively identifies and addresses threats and performance issues before they escalate. This solution aggregates data from across the Citrix ecosystem, generating actionable insights that empower administrators to manage user and application security effectively.

Citrix M&A activity

Citrix's acquisition journey began in the early 2000s, with strategic deals such as the purchase of ExpertCity in 2003, which expanded its remote desktop capabilities.

Over the following decades, Citrix continued growing through acquisitions that complemented its product line or opened new markets. A 2014 deal for Framehawk boosted its virtual desktop and app delivery over wireless networks.

In 2017, Citrix made the notable decision to acquire Unidesk to enhance its application layering technology for virtual desktop environments (VDI). This acquisition was key to strengthening Citrix’s VDI offerings by simplifying the management and deployment of applications across virtual desktops, further solidifying its market position.

One of the more significant acquisitions in recent years was the purchase of Wrike in 2021 for $2.25 billion. Wrike, a work management platform, competes with popular workplace collaboration tools like Asana. This acquisition marked Citrix's largest at the time and aimed to enhance its product portfolio by integrating comprehensive work management and collaboration capabilities.

The company's biggest deal in its history came in 2022, when private equity firms Vista Equity Partners and Evergreen Coast Capital acquired Citrix for $16.5 billion. This acquisition underscored Citrix's immense value and set the stage for its next evolution under the newly formed Cloud Software Group. This move was a strategic pivot, providing Citrix with substantial backing to innovate and expand within the cloud computing and virtualization markets.

In April 2024, Cloud Software Group and Microsoft entered an eight-year strategic partnership to enhance joint cloud solutions and generative AI for over 100 million users. This collaboration is designed to bolster Citrix's virtual application and desktop platform, integrate new AI capabilities, and promote Citrix as the preferred Microsoft Global Azure Partner for Enterprise Desktop as a Service. Additionally, Cloud Software Group will invest $1.65 billion in Microsoft's cloud and AI technologies. The partnership aims to simplify licensing, accelerate R&D, and improve productivity through the use of Microsoft 365 and Azure services.

In 2025, Citrix continued its growth through strategic acquisitions, most notably the purchase of Unicon, which enables customers to maximize the value of their endpoints by providing secure access to the Citrix platform. This move further strengthens Citrix’s position in secure digital workspaces and supports its ongoing expansion within Cloud Software Group. The company remains focused on advancing its cloud and virtualization offerings, integrating new technologies, and deepening its partnerships to meet the evolving needs of enterprise customers.

With its robust technology and significant market presence, now supported by major investment from the Cloud Software Group, Citrix is well-positioned to continue its leadership role in cloud computing, virtualization, and beyond, driving innovation and growth in these critical technology sectors​.

Key people at Citrix

The strategic direction of Citrix and its parent, Cloud Software Group, is shaped by a seasoned leadership team. At the helm of Cloud Software Group is CEO Tom Krause, who brings over two decades of experience in the technology sector. Before this role, he was an executive at Broadcom, where he led the Broadcom Software Group. Krause also holds a position as a special government employee advising the US Department of the Treasury.

Within the Citrix business unit, Sridhar Mullapudi serves as co-president and general manager, where he is responsible for the business, product, and technology strategy for Citrix and NetScaler's extensive portfolio. Having been with Citrix for nearly 25 years, Mullapudi has held various leadership roles in product, engineering, and general management, and was pivotal in the company's transition during the pandemic. He shares the co-president title with Hector Lima, who leads the go-to-market sales organization and manages strategic customer and partner relationships. Lima has a long history with Citrix, having grown his career there for over 20 years in various sales and customer experience roles.

Overseeing product development and technical innovation for Citrix is Jitendra Deshpande, the senior vice president and head of engineering. With over two decades of experience in the software industry, Deshpande has a proven track record of leading global engineering teams and has been crucial in driving revenue through cloud services. Financial operations, budgeting, and planning for Citrix are led by Roger Rees, who holds the position of senior director of finance. At the parent company level, Tom Berquist is the chief financial officer for the cloud software gtoup, responsible for worldwide financial operations and reporting.

What can customers expect from doing business with Citrix?

Citrix has cemented its leadership in digital workspace technology with a robust portfolio that includes virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), desktop as a service (DaaS), and integrated digital workspace platforms. These solutions empower organizations to securely and seamlessly access applications and data across any device or network, supporting flexible and productive work environments.

Understanding the importance of strong partnerships, Citrix has built a variety of partner programs to provide collaborators with essential tools, training, and resources. These programs are designed to strengthen customer relationships and drive shared success. For instance, the Citrix Fusion Resell program offers partners financial incentives, sales and marketing support, and access to expert guidance, enabling them to manage customer lifecycles and unlock new business opportunities.

The Citrix Fusion Service Provider program further supports partners by enabling them to deliver Citrix-based services through rental, subscription, or managed service models. This approach helps partners transform how their customers work while creating sustainable, long-term revenue streams.

Through its focus on innovative, secure workspaces and the cultivation of strategic partnerships, Citrix remains a vital force in enabling digital transformation for enterprises worldwide.

Developers will soon be able to run full-fat Linux on their smartphones, with the news that Samsung is bringing support for Linux distros to its flagship Galaxy range.

The company announced that it is working on an app, dubbed Linux on Galaxy, that will allow Samsung Galaxy S8, S8+ and Note 8 devices to dual-boot Linux-based distributions in addition to the base Android OS. The feature will also be DeX-compatible, switching to a full-screen desktop environment when placed in the DeX docking station.

Rather than being intended to let users run their favourite Linux distro for everyday use, the feature is designed to allow developers to use Samsung's devices for writing and testing code.

"Although it's in trial phase, Linux on Galaxy is our innovative solution to bring the Linux experience on PC to mobile, and then further onto a larger display with Samsung DeX,"the company said.

"Now developers can code using their mobile on-the-go and seamlessly continue the task on a larger display with Samsung DeX."

"This represents a significant step forward for software developers, who can now set up a fully functional development environment with all the advantages of a desktop setting that is accessible anytime, anywhere."

While Samsung has promised that the forthcoming feature will let developers "work with their preferred Linux-based distributions", it has not specified whether developers will have access to the full plethora of Linux distros, or whether they will have to pick from a smaller selection.

Samsung has stressed that the project is still "a work in progress", but developers that want to be notified of availability as soon as possible to sign up here.

30/03/2017:The Samsung Galaxy S8 can replace your desktop

The Galaxy S8, Samsung's new flagship device, is more than just a smartphone - it can also be transformed into a desktop computer, thanks to Samsung's new DeX solution.

Short for 'Desktop eXperience', Samsung DeX is a dock released alongside the S8 that enables the phone to be used with a monitor, mouse and keyboard.It features an optimised UI designed specifically for use in desktop mode, andsupports resizable windows, taskbar notifications and contextual menus, transforming the device into a fully-fledged desktop when it needs to be one.

In addition to stock apps, Samsung has partnered with Microsoft and Adobe to include DeX compatibility with apps like Adobe Acrobat Reader mobile, Lightroom Mobile and the Office suite. When docked, these apps will shift to a desktop-style user interface for easier use with a mouse and keyboard.

"The smartphone has become the central point for the modern mobile professional, and when giving a presentation or editing documents remotely, it means they can work effectively using just their smartphone. We developed Samsung DeX with the highly mobile worker in mind, giving them a convenient and flexible desktop experience," said Samsung's mobile CTO Injong Rhee.

"Our collaboration with key partners such as Adobe and Microsoft was essential in the development of Samsung DeX, as they share our vision for building excellence in mobile productivity. With Samsung DeX, enterprise users can also be assured their smartphone and data is protected by the Samsung Knox security platform built into the smartphone. Samsung DeX redefines what a smartphone can do to keep mobile workers productive."

The DeX dock also comes with a full suite of connectivity options; it features a HDMI port for plugging in a monitor, two USB 2.0 ports, Ethernet connectivity and power via USB Type-C, with peripherals connecting via WUSB, Bluetooth or RF. It's even got Samsung's adaptive fast charging built in to juice up your phone while docked, with the company's Knox security technology ensuring it stays safe while connected.

In a move that should be very interesting to business users, Samsung has worked with three major virtualisation partners, including Citrix, VMWare and AWS, to offer their desktop virtualisation services on the Samsung DeX. This means employees can use their S8 as a thin client to access all their Windows enterprise apps without needing a laptop.

Citrix CEO Kirill Tataranov debuted the idea of the 'software-defined perimeter' at the company's annual Synergy conference, hosted in its home state of Florida.

During his opening keynote which laid out the vision of the firm Tatarinov claimed that we're already in the midst of World War III, but that as it's happening in cyberspace we can't see it. Humans, he said, are very bad at understanding the gravity of things that we can't see.

Alluding to the global ransomware attack that happened in early May, and the many attacks that preceded it, Tatarinov said: "There's a real, dire need for all of us to mobilise all our resources and get beyond cyber security.

"Let us not have another attack be another wake-up call."

Continuing on this theme, Tatarinov introduced the concept of the 'secure digital workspace' and the 'software-defined perimeter'.

At the heart of both ideas is the new Citrix Workspace, which now brings all the apps a user may want together in a single location and also makes provisioning of the apps easier for IT.

For the Workspace to be a 'secure digital workspace', though, requires the real-time behavioural and contextual analytics tools available now in NetScaler MAS 12. This can open or restrict access to apps, data and services automatically based on the type of device in use, the type of network the device is connected to, and the location of the individual.

Additionally, if a user starts behaving erratically, whether that's downloading massive amounts of data, accessing information they have never previously touched, or seemingly rapidly moving between geographies, NetScaler MAS 12 can detect this. It can then intervene to automatically quarantine the user, for example, or at the other end of the scale, flag their behaviour as inappropriate to the IT team.

The 'software-defined perimeter', meanwhile, describes the idea that a person can be working from anywhere on any device at any time, so it's therefore most important that the software they're using to access corporate data is as secure as can be.

Both these concepts are emblematic of Citrix's desire to pivot towards becoming what Tatarinov described in a press conference as a "new breed of security company".

"It's not an accident, we're all seeing what's going on around the world. As a responsible company, it's our responsibility to do more [and] to do more for our customers too."

Almost half of large UK businesses have suffered a ransomware attack in the past year, with nearly one third fearing that, although the situation has been resolved, the criminals may still be lurking in their systems.

Citrix surveyed 500 UK-based IT decision makers in companies with 250 or more employees, finding that 45% had fallen victim to a successful ransomware attack.

Despite this history of victimhood, the research also found that 11% of businesses this size don't have a formal ransomware policy in place and while 50% said plans are in place to have such a policy within the next 12 months, 38% said no such plans existed.

Knowing how to deal with a ransomware infection should one occur is increasingly important, though, as this strain of malware becomes ever more popular.

"A lot of this is about isolating a potentially infected machine, deciding whether you're going to pay the ransom or not there's a business choice to be made there - and then being able to build confidence that you have actually dealt with the ransomware attack and it isn't still lurking there," Chris Mayers, chief security architect at Citrix, told IT Pro.

This third element is also a current cause for concern, with 36% of those surveyed who had fallen victim to ransomware in the past 12 months telling Citrix they doubted all traces of that attack had been fully removed.

Ultimately, said Mayers, companies need to ensure they have a ransomware plan in place, including knowing who makes the decision as to whether or not to pay, as well as being sure they can isolate the infected machine(s) and having a solid backup-and-recovery plan in place.

Citrix has announced the appointment of Michelle Senecal de Fonseca as the company's northern Europe VP to help drive forward its sales and services operations in the Northern Europe region.

She will be tasked with working with the organisation's partners to drive revenues and execute a growth strategy that will benefit both partners and Citrix, building on the company's existing partner programmes and introducing new ways for everyone to improve their performance.

“It is an exciting time to join Citrix as it places greater emphasis on cloud services," Senecal de Fonseca said. "Work is increasingly digital and virtual. To be productive, we all need a seamless user experience across different devices and platforms."

Michelle was previously global managing director for Vodafone Cloud and Hosting Services, which forms part of the network's Global Enterprise group. She was responsible for all areas of the division's business including sales, strategy, product and service development.

"Citrix’s strategy of building the world’s best integrated technology services for secure delivery of apps and data – anytime, anywhere, as a service in the Citrix Cloud - can be central in enabling our customers achieve those goals. I am looking forward to helping Citrix customers across Northern Europe build and implement innovative cloud strategies.”

Senecal de Fonseca's expertise lies in international telecommunications and technology whether as part of global enterprises or smaller startups. This ensures she can address all levels of service and understands the importance of helping companies grow to reach their expectations.

“Michelle’s experience and expertise will provide invaluable support and insight for many of our customers in Northern Europe as they embark on their cloud journey," Sherif Seddik, Citrix's EMEA vice president of sales and services added.

"Adopting cloud technologies in the enterprise is much more complex than just downloading an app. Companies have to rationalise all of their past, present, and future investments and tie them together seamlessly as they progress toward the cloud future"

Citrix (NASDAQ:CTXS) has named Justin Sutton-Parker as its new partner director, Northern Europe.

The vendor says it is a “new, integrated” role, reporting to Citrix’s VP of partners in EMEA, Luca Marinelli. Sutton-Parker will be responsible for the growth and development of the Citrix partner ecosystem across the Northern Europe region, comprised of Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Norway, Sweden and the UK. The role will focus on managing a team of partner and account managers, as well as implementing programmes and go-to-market strategies with systems integrators, distributors and Citrix solutions advisors across the region.

With twenty-two years of in the tech industry, Sutton-Parker most recently spent ten years with HP in various roles including managing chief technologist, country leader for cloud service providers, global alliances director, Microsoft alliance director and public sector manager. He has also previously worked with CommVault, BT Engage and Avnet.

“I’m drawn to Citrix’s vision and proven ability to connect people to apps and data wherever they may be,” comments Sutton-Parker. “Citrix offers such a unique value proposition and capability that allows the partner community to really capitalise on the promise of making critical systems securely available to users across any device or platform.”

“Smart partnering is vital to Citrix’s continued success across Northern Europe. Justin’s extensive knowledge of the partner and alliances landscape, combined with his strong leadership, will be invaluable to Citrix as it further strengthens relations with a range of organisations across the region; he has consistently demonstrated an ability to grow and manage dynamic and large businesses,” adds Marinelli.

Citrix CEO Kirill Tatarinov recently said that channel partners play a “very important, very significant role” in securing the company’s move into the SMB space.

Raspberry Pi, the microcomputer created to encourage children to learn how to code, is being brought into the enterprise as a thin client.

During his opening keynote at the company's annual Synergy conference in Las Vegas, Citrix's new CEO, Kirill Tatarinov, said: "We're introducing support for a very interesting and revolutionary new form factor, which is support for Raspberry Pi devices. A really thin client a client that can be procured for under $100 and we now have Citrix ADI technology running on a system on a chip environment. We can provide this new scenario and this is truly exciting."

In collaboration with another presenter, Tatarinov showed a live demo of a Raspberry Pi being used as a thin client running HDX on a chip offeringWindows 10 desktop with XenApp and XenMobile security.

At a press conference held following the keynote, IT Pro asked why Citrix had elected to introduce support for Raspberry Pi, when there are so many dedicated enterprise thin clients available.

"The way we look at things is not just around innovation, it's not just around partnerships, but it really is TCO/ROI," said Bill Burley, Citrix's corporate VP and GM of Workspace Services. "A big part of it is the endpoint, and so over the years if you analyse buying a PC and what that cost is, not just the upfront costs, but the ongoing management needs of that PC, then you start to realise that [they] consume a lot of capital expenditure that goes out in delivering virtualised environments."

Burley praised the original idea of encouraging children to code with the unit, but went on to say that its ability to run high-end graphics and video as needed by the enterprise at a very low cost made it attractive as a thin client for business as well.

Even if each Raspberry Pi is only used for a couple of years, Burley said, it would still be a fraction of the cost of purchasing, maintaining and replacing alternatives over the same period.

"PCs [are] on average $700-$750, thin clients are $400. Raspberry Pi is just $100," said Burley.

"So it's not just I can connect and get to Windows apps', it's I can connect and run all my high-end graphics, all my video' it changes the dynamic of how you consume technology when you can drop something below $100," he added.

An additional demonstration of Raspberry Pi running the Xen portfolio will take place during the second day keynote on Wednesday.

See also: Top Raspberry Pi projects to try yourself

UK workers take greater steps to protect personal files than work documents, a new study has revealed.

The survey of 2,000 full-time UK workers around the country carried out by Censuswide last year on behalf of Citrix, found what the virtualisation and cloud services firm described as "an alarming disparity in employee attitudes toward work and personal data".

Of those surveyed, 45 per cent said they regularly use passwords to secure documents at home, but only 35 per cent said they did so at work.

This contrast is even more stark when it comes to the destruction of physical documents. While nearly 70 per cent of respondents said they shred and dispose of unwanted personal documents, only 40 per cent do the same at work.

The survey also asked about people's attitudes towards device security. While almost 60 per cent of over 55s said they would only use work devices with trusted company security software, only 47 per cent of workers aged 25-34 could say the same.

This comparatively laid-back attitude could present a significant security risk for businesses if an unsecured device with access to the company network or data were compromised, Citrix claimed.

Chris Mayers, chief security architect at the company, said: "This research demonstrates that despite many individuals being well aware of basic precautions for handling their own personal data, too many are not so conscientious at work.

"Employers have a responsibility to provide the tools and safeguards: employees need to use them. Protecting a company's digital assets is a two-way street."

Citrix (NASDAQ: CTXS) has revealed it is to shake up its distributor incentive programme to provide a consistent service across all geographies.

Speaking to Channel Pro at the vendor’s annual partner event, Citrix Summit, channel chief Kimberly Martin said the company is lacking “a consistent global programme”.

She explained: “It’s important we have a worldwide distribution strategy as we have a worldwide distribution partners, and we’re handling them dramatically differently between our geos today.”

Although there are no firm details yet on the changes, Martin says Citrix’s distributor channel in EMEA “needs to focus a little bit less on the operational component and more on where there business is moving, which is around training and development of our silver partners.”

Martin added she had received feedback from distributors that claimed the current system did little to help them with smaller deals.

“They said: ‘You pay me X percent on $1m deals and I don’t touch that deal…At the same time if I do a deal with a silver partner that I’ve spent time developing and building training for, and enabling and sending people out to understand the Citrix solution set – I get paid the same percentage but it’s a much smaller deal size. I’d rather pay more for the silvers and less for the $1m deal.’”

A priority, says the channel exec, is hiring a new worldwide distribution lead before implementing any changes.

Jason Tooley, Citrix country manager UK and Ireland, says he expects the new approach will be “positively received” by Citrix UK disties Tech Data and Arrow ECS.

“As a supplier we’re looking to create more revenue for distribution that they can reinvest back into the business. That reinvestment means building better skills that they can then enable our partners to drive more capability,” he told Channel Pro. “They’ve been asking us about this over the last six to nine months, and they’ll see this as a positive way forward.”

He added: “We rely heavily on distribution in many different areas, not just in our smaller partners. We expect distribution to have a key role with our managed partners as well. We need distribution to carry a heavy load and the more revenue and investment, we create the better the results will be.”

See also:

Distributors: what do they really bring to the table?

Citrix unveils back to basics strategy

Citrix announces midmarket push

Citrix (NASDAQ: CTXS) interim CEO Bob Calderoni has vowed to go back to basics following a turbulent 12 months.

Speaking at its global partner event, Citrix Summit, Calderoni (pictured) said the vendor was refocusing on its core strengths of secure delivery of apps and data.

“People are too often looking for what’s new…and ignore what’s been successful and never sticking with one thing long enough for it to be successful,” he said. “If we look at back at Citrix over the past couple of years I think we were guilty of that ourselves.”

He told partners: “From a product perspective we’re no longer spreading our limited resources across so many things, most of them were too small to ever make a difference.”

2015 saw the firm cede to activist investor pressure, highlighted by the exit of long-time CEO Mark Templeton, as well as plans to spin off its GoTo range of products and cut 1,000 jobs.

The only reference to the disruption at the event was made by Carlos Sartorius, Citrix’s worldwide sales and services chief, who thanked the firm’s partners, employees and customers for sticking with Citrix.

He said 2015 “wasn’t an easy start; we all thought we would be able to pick up and go quickly, but we had some hurdles, some disappointments, some low points in the first half. But then we got together and were able to focus and were able to come back.”

The exec admitted that Citrix’s broad portfolio has made it expensive for partners in the past, particularly with training employees. “We brought in a lot of new products, a lot of distractions,” he said.

While announcing yesterday that it was offloading its CloudPlatform and CloudPortal Business Manager product lines, Citrix announced it will refocus on its NetScaler application delivery controller (ADC), XenServer and Citrix Workspace Cloud.

“[NetScaler] will be core to the future growth of the company,” said Klaus Oestermann, Citrix’s SVP and general manager, delivery networks, to cheers from partners. “The NetScaler brand is very strong and you you’ll see us double down on our marketing efforts in 2016.”

Citrix channel chief Kimberly Martin also detailed a new campaign to grab midmarket share in 2016.

“We need to take all the good things that we did and make it better and be relevant moving forward,” Sartorius tells Channel Pro.

He revealed Citrix has been testing its new ‘back to basics’ message with partners over the past few months, who he claims “are pleased that we’re clear that these are our core products and this is our core messaging.”

The first killer usecase for wearables will appear on Apple Watch, Citrix CEO Mark Templeton has claimed.

Speaking at a press Q&A at the company's annual Citrix Synergy conference in Orlando, Templeton said: "My early assessment is that there are sparse, small usecases, but not one killer usecase. I think we will get to a stage where there are a few killer usecases that could be personal, [but] we think a lot [will be] in business computing, for example ... maybe the watch is an incredible authentication device."

Templeton said that everyone is "dabbling [and] trying to find what the compelling usecases are". Indeed, Citrix is included in these "dabblers", having produced one app each on Android Wear and Apple Watch, GoToMeeting and SlideStream respectively.

However, Templeton believes Apple Watch will be the platform where a clear usecase for wearables will appear.

"I put Apple in the driving seat simply because developing apps for [Apple Watch] is so simple and they will get more experimentation faster than anyone else in the market, I think," said Templeton. This in turn leads to a greater probability of a clear reason to buy appearing on that platform rather than a rival's as "whoever gets the most experimentation will find out where those usecases are".

Additionally, despite only having recently come out, Apple Watch is more commonplace than Android Wear devices, according to Templeton.

"I've got every single version of an Android wear watch and wherever I went I was the only one, that's not the case with Apple Watch," he said.

"[Developers] will learn from that and the consumers will take them there," he said.

AppSense is looking to bolster its channel by recruiting a number of new partners, particularly Citrix, VMware and Microsoft VARs.

The user virtualisation, workspace and desktop management technology vendor currently has around 100 partners in EMEA.

AppSense’s VP for Northern Europe, Atif Ahmed tells Channel Pro: “Ultimately we want to be a pure-play channel organisation and to achieve this we have to provide our partners with the tools, resources, support and investment required to make us a profitable proposition for the channel.

“Key to this will be finding partners are capable of integrating our solutions with Citrix and VMware to deliver an optimal user experience. Having key partners with a first-rate understanding of the solutions from each company, and how they integrate is a key focus for us.”

Ahmed adds that AppSense is aiming to be easier to work with, by simplifying processes and assisting with new business, to make its partners more successful.

The exec joined AppSense in November from Websense, where he was VP of sales for the UK, Ireland and Benelux.

The vendor also recently appointed Zoe Clark as its channel sales director for the region. Clark – who is responsible for delivering AppSense’s channel programme to partners in Northern Europe – also joins from Websense, where she was director of channel sales. She previously worked at Check Point, as did Ahmed and AppSense EMEA SVP, Nick Lowe.

Says Lowe: “Atif and Zoe bring a wealth of experience in building, executing and managing channel partners and will help us accelerate our channel strategy both in the short and long term. We are delighted that they have chosen to join us, as their expertise will be of huge benefit to AppSense and our partners.”

The firm recently announced Computacenter, Kelway and Ultima as its first UK Platinum partners since the accreditation was launched last year.

As well as the new platinum tier, AppSense has introduced several new features to its channel operations over the past 12 months, including the appointment of an internal sales development team to generate new business leads for partners, a technical and a commercial learning management system and accreditations, and a revised and extended MDF for new and existing partners, as well as a deal registration system.

Says Ahmed: “The channel is key to our business and we are committed to investing in developing strong relationships with our partners, helping them improve revenues and increase margins.”

Citrix’s (NASDAQ:CTXS) EMEA chief, Carlos Sartorius, has been named senior VP of the vendor’s worldwide sales and services.

He replaces Al Monserrat, a fifteen year Citrix veteran, who’s leaving the company. He has run sales and services since 2008, during which time he re-engineered the sales organisation and is credited with strengthening Citrix’s go-to-market model and growing revenues by nearly 90 percent.

Sartorius will report directly to Citrix president and CEO, Mark Templeton.

“I want to recognise the huge contribution and impact Al has had since joining our company 15 years ago,” says Templeton. “It has been an honour and a privilege to have had him on our team, and I want to extend my heartfelt thanks and best wishes to him as he takes the next step in his journey.”

Prior to Citrix, Sartorius held a range of senior industry leadership positions, most recently with HP, where he was VP and general manager of HP’s networking business unit in EMEA. Prior to that he served as CEO of Orange Business Services, was president for Avaya’s EMEA business and had a number of leadership roles at Motorola.

Adds Templeton: “Carlos has done a remarkable job getting our EMEA business back on track and has all of the right qualities to lead the ongoing development and growth of our global field organisations. He is well versed in our go-to-market, partner and channel models and has a deep understanding of our customers’ challenges and perspectives, making him the perfect executive for this role as we continue to drive toward our vision of a software-defined workplace.”

Sartorius’ promotion is effective immediately. He is moving to the US and will be based in the company’s Santa Clara, California HQ. Monserrat will remain with the company until April 1.

Sartorius’ replacement as chief of Citrix EMEA’s organisation is yet to be announced.

Citrix announced on Monday it has acquired software-defined storage vendor Sanbolic.

Citrix has partnered with Google to push business-critical Windows apps to Chromebooks.

The search giant claims enterprises are increasingly coming round to the charms of Chromebooks, but still need access to line-of-business Windows apps.

To get round this Google has enlisted the help of virtualisation player Citrix, along with its XenApp app delivery system and Citrix Receiver for HTML 5, to allow business users to push out these business-critical apps to Chromebooks.

"Enterprises have been steadily adopting Google Chromebooks as an easy-to-use and cost-effective alternative to traditional computing platorms," said Amit Singh, president of Google Enterprise.

"The approaching Windows XP end-of-life brings a tremendous opportunity for organisations of all types to rethink their approach to computing and transition to Chromebooks for improved manageability, security and cost savings."

Google is sweetening the deal with discounts for adopters. Buy from Chromebooks for Business and you can get $100 off for every managed device, for example.

Citrix also added more collaboration support with GoToMeeting Free, a web app that allows video conferencing for Chromebook users.

Both companies explicitly advise businesses to migrate to Chromebooks from Windows XP, extended support for which ceased yesterday. Google's laptops are cheaper, don't require a Windows license, and can run Windows apps through Citrix and VMware.

IT Pro reviewed the Samsung Chromebook last year and found running Citrix apps on Chrome OS to be highly dependent on your internet connection.

Working away from the office is slowly gaining acceptance among small businesses, according to new research from Citrix and YouGov.

The survey of 200 UK-based SMEs reports 63 per cent of senior executives say they trust their employees to remain productive when working away from the office.

A further 28 per cent of those polled also agreed enabling staff to work flexibly can play an important role in improving their work-life balance, making them less likely to miss important deadlines.

Overall, a quarter of executives report being under more pressure to introduce or increase mobile, flexible working practices than they were five years ago, predominantly due to employee demand (28 per cent) and the need to reduce budget such as travel costs (17 per cent) increase.

While some executives were less trusting when it came to allowing employees to work outside of the office, 21 per cent still conceded that having a flexible working policy makes sense for business continuity.

In fact, research from videoconferencing service provider UCi2i earlier this year indicated that companies lose an annual average of 24 days of extra working hours by not allowing employees to work from home a result of home over-workers' who work more than five hours more per week than their office-based colleagues.

When asked why working from home is so successful, reasons that were given included: peace and quiet for productivity (26 percent), spending the time they would be travelling to the office, working (18 percent) and allowing the ideal work/life balance (13 percent).

"As well as meeting demand to improve individuals' work-life balance, the growing acceptance of flexible working among senior teams shows managers are now realising the commercial advantages it offers," says Andrew Millard, senior director marketing, EMEA, SaaS division at Citrix.

"In the BYOD era, employees using virtual technologies can work just as effectively away from the office as they would within it in most cases contributing to lower travel and office costs for the business."

ShareFile is Dropbox competitor. That's what you need to know if you are trying to work out what to do with out-of-control file sharing in your business. When putting together a nice shortlist of suppliers of file sharing upload utility products, because you've been bitten by the rather ambiguous marketplace fit that Dropbox now presents, it's sensible to investigate the alternatives, and figure out quite why it is that Dropbox has achieved the "brand as term for whole activity" status, putting it up there with Hoover, iTunes and JCB.

ShareFile presents itself as being more of a business-focussed file sharing environment. This means that where Dropbox is pursuing a feature list and development process largely driven by the single person and (very) small business feature expectation, ShareFile in common with several other players in this space is starting from a very different part of the labyrinth. And it's a very successful part too. I met with the inventor, founder and long-term godfather of ShareFile, Jesse Lipson, during his recent trip through London, and there were a number of phrases which made me sit up. Stuff like "When Citrix bought us we had 350 staff" and "I've bought a couple of other businesses recently" are not statements you hear very often from skilled developers; from product entrepreneurs; or indeed, from those who have themselves been the target of a recent takeover process.

For a development company, 350 employees is quite a lot. Traditionally, the view is that very small, sharply focussed and egotistically driven dev teams produce the most popular products. I know that Parallels, the Russian VM and web control panel company, is about this number of people, and so is ReadIRIS, the Belgian OCR gurus, whereas SABRE's European dev centre is about twice this number. What makes this number notable is that it's exceedingly uncommon to get taken over, and carry on as if nothing had happened. Most of the bigger purchase-making software businesses (Symantec, Computer Associates and Microsoft spring to mind) make major changes in their takeover targets, realising profit boosts by shedding lame duck parts or lame duck staff, or by having Sopranos-style fallings-out with the charismatic leader of the target company.

Not that I am comparing Jesse Lipson to John McAffee here. There could be no greater contrast between the quietly confident, vegetarian Lipson and the fugitive, raving McAffee. Lipson seems to have quietly bucked the stereotype through both the initial growth of ShareFile, and the fortunes of life inside Citrix as a safe haven from which to look out at the cloud software/storage world and make the right product development and startup purchasing decisions.

ShareFile has got the point, too: There's not one size to fit all, there are 30 sizes for 30 sectors. Just thinking about the optimum size of a dev team, and the stated size of the ShareFile workforce, that's about 10 staff per sector so actually that would explain the success, the flexibility and vigour of the development process.

I took the offer of a demo account with some alacrity. I am a networks admin and I view the consumer-side development priorities of the mass market file-sharers with a mixture of contempt, and alarm. It only takes one irrelevant feature change and a silent password leak for those services to turn into a living nightmare, so I was keen to follow up on Jesse's offer of a trial account on ShareFile and the server-side data replicator tool to make it integrate with my home network (which as PC Pro readers will know, has nearly 30TB of disk space, six fibre connections, four switches, three firewalls and enough processing power to support about 3,000 users).

The other thing required by ShareFile on a Windows machine inside your business is an SSL Certificate, registered with a global public registrar. Self-Signed certificates won't do, it seems.

I am torn on this problem. On the one hand, you can see how Dropbox steals a march in many companies because it doesn't make the first test as onerous as this. On the other hand, if a company takes the business of data security seriously then the odd few thousand dollars for an SSL Certificate-issuing contract with Thawte or Comodo is nothing in the greater scheme of things, and provides an easy and verifiable degree of protection against at least the idlest and poorest of hackers. I expect the industry sectors included in ShareFile's list have this kind of appreciation of the realities of cloud security as part of their company culture, and that's driven ShareFile's growth and customer success story in such a way as to overwhelm minor barriers to casual software trials for those with a serious job to do. At the same time, it's pretty commonplace for products with a certificate requirement as part of their cookbook, to make it easy for people to start up with self-signed, isolated certificates. However, it would be very unfair to say that a major, if partly hidden player, in this market should be passed over for this reason.

When it comes to flexible working, many fear that ‘out of sight’ means ‘out of control’.

These same fears have seen a resistance to allow personal devices to be used in the workplace.

However, as the latest YouGov survey commissioned by Citrix shows, this situation is changing. Almost two thirds (64 percent) of today’s SMEs are achieving measurable productivity gains as a result of adopting personal devices in the office, with almost a quarter (24 percent) seeing a 20 percent-plus improvement.

This compares to only 46 percent seeing tangible gains in a similar survey two years ago. Equally striking is that the number of SMEs who saw no measurable improvement had halved, which, over the same period, fell from 27 to just 14 percent.

Flexible workstyles

Looking back at national events over the last few years, there have been several key drivers that have contributed towards more flexible working strategies.

Tighter regulation in supporting a more parent-friendly workplace is having an impact, as are environmental pressures to reduce the corporate carbon footprint. Other external factors such as the 2011 volcanic ash cloud which grounded flights across the UK have played their part in increasing awareness of the need to put in place initiatives to maintain efficiencies and minimise disruption.

In 2012, UK government departments took the lead in seeking to minimise transport disruption and loss of productivity during the London Olympics by encouraging staff to work from home, both in the run up to and during the event.

However, as the Citrix survey highlights, business owners and executives are seeing most pressure coming from within the organisation, with employees across all departments recognising the benefits that flexible working can deliver. Combined with the growing availability and adoption of advanced cloud-based meeting and collaboration tools, these technologies are now enabling a secure and reliable ‘work anywhere, with anyone’ environment, overcoming previous barriers to wide-scale adoption of remote working practices.

Win-win for businesses and employees

For firms that have been reluctant to introduce flexible working, concern over potential loss of productivity has been a big issue. Others are worried that staff cannot stay in touch with the business and function just as effectively, which has acted as another barrier to adopting a ‘work from anywhere’ policy.

Similarly, concerns over staff being distracted by using their own phones for personal purposes during working hours also acted as a deterrent to greater flexibility.

However, organisations that have overcome these trust and technology issues are now seeing the tangible benefits of operating a more flexible workforce with half (50 percent) achieving measurable productivity gains of up to 30 percent and a further 14 percent achieving even more.

Security is also a hurdle to be overcome in adopting more flexible working practices, with the greatest concerns expressed around allowing remote access to the corporate networks and downloading applications and documents.

In many cases, this is more connected with reluctance to change existing practices, rather than the lack of affordable technology. The latest HD video-conferencing, remote meeting and web application-sharing tools emulate almost all aspects of physical face-to-face engagements, enabling staff to be equally effective in working with customers and colleagues, irrespective of location – and with the highest levels of security.

Increasingly, the growing requirement to collaborate internally and with third-party clients, suppliers and contingent workers is also proving central to the creation of an effective, agile and flexible working environment, with clear and tangible benefits to the organisation, its employees and customers.

Andrew Millard is senior director marketing, EMEA, SaaS division at Citrix

Citrix has unveiled the latest iteration of its XenDesktop virtualisation solution, claiming it will enables business to port Windows applications to mobile devices quickly and easily with minimal ongoing support.

XenDesktop 7 was unveiled by Citrix CEO Mark Templeton at the company's Citrix Synergy conference in LA this week. He said around 90 per cent of the apps used by businesses today are Windows-based so believes Citrix needs to offer something to help address the shift from the desktop to greater mobility.

"This is application and desktop virualisation re-imagined for simplicity and mobile," he said of the tool that is the first borne out of the company's Project Avalon initiative which is focused on mobilising apps and services and making them fit for purpose in the cloud era.

With an increasingly mobile-hungry workforce, XenDesktop 7 will help business respond by enabling them to deliver Windows applications and desktop services as cloud-based services across any device, according to Citrix.

XenDesktop 7 features HDX technology that boosts WAN bandwidth efficiency by 100 per cent, thanks to the incorporation of H.264 compression, which also optimises full HD video bit rates to enhance the 3G viewing experience.

There's also touch screen capabilities that ensure multi-touch gestures/swipes into scrolling commands and easy navigation as well as native menu controls that make complex mouse navigation requests and pull down menus a simple affair on mobile devices.

Furthermore, Citrix believes it is helping "take your enterprise mobile in a secure and productive way" by utilising tools such as the Citrix StoreFront interface and Citrix Netscaler Gateway offering.

"Do you know what I hate about it?" Templeton said. "Absolutely nothing!" as he said the solution eradicates the need for three previously resource draining tasks: workload provisioning, app-by-app publishing and Windows app migration.

"There's only one package to download and you get automated installation and deployment. It can be as few as eight clicks to go from scratch to basic set-up and it could be just 20 minutes until you get started. It's pretty amazing," Templeton said, highlighting the new solution's ease of use which is claimed to reduce the time it takes to deploy new services by up to 80 per cent.

XenDesktop 7 will be available from June in Enterprise, Platinum and VDI editions with a choice of per-user, per-device and concurrent licensing options.

The IT landscape will "change dramatically" over the next seven years, compared to the previous 30, according to a new report by industry analysts Ovum.

In its Enterprise 2020 report, Ovum said that the acceleration of consumerisation and the influx of devices and platforms entering the workplace would mean that future employees would no longer be "tethered to one location". These employees would be able to share and access knowledge more easily.

It said that a wide range of interconnected, social, mobile and cloud-based collaboration platforms on multiple devices will enable employees to participate in the "shareconomy", a key theme at CeBit last week.

The analysts said that organisations must act now to adapt to this changing landscape or risk being left behind by both their markets and their employees.

"The way in which we work will change dramatically over the next seven years, more than in the previous 30, meaning the enterprise of 2020 will need to be more agile and more responsive than it is today," says Richard Edwards, principal analyst at Ovum.

"To remain successful, there will have to be significant change in operations, systems and cultural levels. By 2020, knowledge workers will need and want a set of tools far different to those of today, so for the CIO, the important choice will be which vendor to follow."

The report outline four players in the industry that would have most effect in changing the IT landscape: Google, Yammer, Citrix and VMware.

Ovum said that Google is at the "apex of consumer web behaviour". It said this behaviour is finding its way into the enterprise and affecting employees' expectations of the collaboration tools and connected devices they use for work. "Google's position across cloud services markets, mobility and social networking means that it brings a unique perspective on the road ahead for enterprise IT," the report said.

The analysts said that Yammer has pioneered what social networking and collaboration can do in the enterprise, taking behaviours learned in the consumer space on platforms such as Facebook and converting them into business productivity and new models for management.

"It is an exciting business with an exciting take on the future of work. Microsoft thought so too, acquiring it in the middle of this project and making it part of the Microsoft Office Division," said the report.

Ovum said that Citrix is evolving as the IT market evolves. It added that the company was striking a delicate balance between the governance needs of the IT department and usability and accessibility requirements of the increasingly connected employee.

VMware was praised by the analysts for transforming from an IT-focused organisation to one focused on the end user, "enabling end users to connect to their data, applications and desktops from any device without having to sacrifice IT security and control."

Virtualisation giant Citrix is to acquire mobile device management player Zenprise for an undisclosed sum.

Silicon Valley-based Zenprise was founded in 2003 and specialises in on-premise and cloud products that help business users protect the data stored on mobile devices.

Citrix said it plans to use Zenprise's technology to enhance its existing mobile management product suite, which including its CloudGateway and Me@Work offerings.

The company claims the acquisition means it will become the first company to offer mobile device, application and data management to enterprise users via a single product line.

The deal is subject to regulatory approval and is expected to close during the first quarter of 2013.

In a blog post, Amit Pandey, president and CEO of Zenprise, said joining forces means both firms will be well-placed to help end users cope with the demands of BYOD.

"Users want mobile freedom to choose their own smartphones and tablets and use the productivity and business apps that help them get their jobs done," he wrote.

"But in a world where users can lose or leak sensitive corporate data through device loss or by synchronising content to a tapestry of cloud-connected endpoints, the need for mobile governance and security is paramount.

"Both Citrix and Zenprise see it as our job to reconcile these two worlds, giving IT the tools to protect the organisation," he added.

Sumit Dhawan, vice president and general manager of mobile solutions at Citrix, said Zenprise will be a good fit for its business.

"Zenprise was a clear choice for Citrix, with its...experienced team, a history of innovation, and a footprint on more than one million devices," said Dhawan.

"With a complete Citrix enterprise mobility solution, customers have all the necessary pieces to manage and secure mobile apps, content and devices."

Mobile technology and the bring your own device' trend are the driving forces behind the IT industry today, according to Martin Duursma, vice president of Citrix Labs.

Speaking at the virtualisation giant's Citrix Synergy conference in Barcelona earlier today, Duursna said - while most companies had been focusing on virualisation - the mobile revolution had been gathering pace in the workplace.

"This mobile revolution is really getting us to rethink our application architectures...[and]we are in this mobile cloud environment," Duursna said.

The answer to this, Duursna claimed, is Citrix XenDesktop FlexCast - a virtualisation offering that allows virtualised desktops to be delivered across all platforms.

Duursna told the audience that FlexCast takes away the complexity of having to choose between different ways of delivering services to mobile and fixed devices.

"American psychologist Barry Schwartz coined the phrase the paradox of choice why more is less'. His premise is that giving people too much choice is not a good thing," said Duursma.

"We are [making it easier for our customers to choose] how to deliver the right application to the right desktop and the right employee [on the right device]."

Duursna's comments echo those made by Citrix CEO Mark Templeton during his keynote speech, who proclaimed the importance of the consumerisation of IT, partially driven by BYOD.

Citrix is to launch two new products that will allow Windows applications and desktops to be delivered as a cloud service.

Project Avalon consists of two releases, dubbed Excalibur and Merlin, and was announced during Citrix CEO Mark Templeton's keynote address at the virtualisation giant's partner and user conference in Barcelona yesterday.

The Excalibur release is "all about simplicity and mobility", said Templeton, and sports a number of technical features to help it achieve that goal, including FlexCast 2.0 desktop virtualisation and performance management offering EdgeSight.

Citrix has also re-invented' its HDX desktop virtualisation optimisation product for this release. The enhanced offering now offers video that is twice as fast and reduces bandwidth consumption tenfold, claimed Templeton.

The Merlin release is focused on automation and cloud. This version of Avalon will run on CloudStack, Citrix's open source framework, and will allow the functions of Excalibur to be automated and operate on a self service basis.

It will also be able to incorporate previous versions of XenApp and XenDesktop virtualisation products to deliver what Templeton described as "Windows-as-a-Service".

The offerings will let businesses consume Windows applications or desktops as a cloud service, which can be delivered across any network to any device, claimed Citrix.

To highlight this capability, Citrix technology strategist Brad Peterson demonstrated during the keynote how Excalibur could be used to access a Windows 8 virtual desktop on an iPad.

The Excalibur release will be available as a tech preview on 1 November. No further release dates for Excalibur or Merlin were given.

Citrix and Cisco are set to increase their collaboration as they aim to make it easier for businesses to transition to the cloud.

The cloud and virtualisation giants will work together to develop a secure, unified access point for applications, data, voice and video to enable mobile working. This, will be enabled through cloud orchestration and cloud networking based on Citrix's NetScaler cloud network platform, the firms said.

The announcement was made during Citrix CEO Mark Templeton's keynote speech as the Synergy 2012 event, in Barcelona. Templeton was joined on the stage by Padmasree Warrior, chief technology and strategy officer of Cisco, who described the collaboration as part of a paradigm shift within the IT arena and the company's outlook.

Warrior explained why the two organisations had decided to come together and why they had chosen to do it now.

"We believe the future of IT is changing and it is going to change much more rapidly than it has over the past six decades or so," she said.

"If you look at the history of the IT industry, every 10 to 20 years we have seen a major transformation, going from mainframe computing to minicomputers and then a cloud server model in the last decade where we all participated in web-based applications."

The collaboration will unfold in three phases. Initially, Cisco will begin recommending NetScaler to its customers. The company will then validate selected Citrix products that are integrated into its own datacentres, followed by jointly creating simplified cloud orchestration for Cisco's datacentres.

Finally, cloud networking will bring together the orchestration and simplified stack elements.

However, Warrior added that Cisco will not be abandoning its own cloud network platform, ACE.

A number of Citrix (NASDAQ:CTXS) channel partners experienced double-digit growth in key technology areas in the last 12 months, according to the firm’s latest Channel Index survey.

The study shows VARs in EMEA are bucking the economic trend in two areas – mobile working – or ‘workshifting’ as Citrix has now termed it – and the move to the cloud.

Citrix surveyed 210 channel partners across the region, and found 56 percent had experienced growth of 10 percent or more in their workshifting business over the last year, with a further 20 percent seeing growth of up to 10 percent.

What’s more, says Citrix, the partners expect to see the same level of growth next year. This is against a backdrop of predictions from forecasters that the Euro zone will contract by 0.5 percent during 2012.

“This is a tremendous result, given the economic conditions,” commented Christian Partarrieu, director of channel sales and alliances for EMEA, at the Citrix Summit in Barcelona today.

The vendor reckons in 2011 desktop virtualisation was being rolled out primarily for office based workers, but in 2012 businesses are looking for the technology to support mobile and home workers.

There also appears to be a shift among Citrix partners away from desktop virtualisation towards enterprise cloud platforms and server virtualisation. When asked what would offer them the greatest potential for growth in the next twelve months, enterprise cloud platform and server virtualisation ranked highest, followed in order by desktop virtualisation, desktop productivity software, mobile device management and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

A quarter of partners forecast double digit growth for cloud infrastructure projects, followed by 28 percent and 23 percent who forecast 6-10 and 0-5 percent growth respectively.

Citrix achieved 16 per cent year-on-year revenue growth during its second quarter, despite the ongoing economic uncertainty in EMEA.

The virtualisation giant banked a revenue of $615 million in Q2 and reported a 50 per cent year-on-year rise in the number of deals it closed that exceeded $1 million.

We saw customers becoming more conservative late in the quarter, delaying orders or reducing the size of transactions.

Nine of these deals originated in EMEA, with the Americas (26) and Pacific (4) regions accounting for the remaining transactions in this group.

Overall, the revenue generated by the EMEA region was up 21 per cent on the previous year's quarter, despite the firm noting a marked decline in the region's economic confidence.

In a conference call with analysts, David Henshall, Citrix's chief financial officer, explained: "We saw customers, particularly in EMEA, becoming more conservative late in the quarter, delaying orders or reducing the size of transactions, based on uncertainty and the economic environment."

The company also reported good growth in its datacentre and cloud business, where revenue topped $112 million. This is 20 per cent higher than in Q2 2011.

Henshall said Netscaler, Citrix's cloud delivery platform, had been responsible for much of this growth, with licence revenue up 15 per cent on Q2 2011.

The revenue generated by the company's Sofware-as-a-Service division grew by 18 per cent this year, thanks to the growing popularity of Citrix's collaboration and data sharing product, ShareFile.

"We saw steady gains in new customer acquisition from both direct and online channels, as well as solid retention rates across the subscriber base," said Henshall.

"Overall, the datacentre and cloud business had a strong first half of 2012, up 25 per cent through midyear."

Meanwhile, the revenue generated by Citrix's desktop solutions division topped $343 million, with the company closing 144 deals involving more than 1,000 seats of its VDI XenDesktop offering.

"In Q2, there were 20 different million-dollar-plus deals for the desktop products," said Henshall.

"We now have 1,800 cloud providers delivering several hundred thousand desktop licenses as a subscription service to their end customers," he added.

Looking ahead, Henshall said the company expects to close the year with a total revenue of around $2.58billion.

Citrix claims its acquisition of mobile network optimisation vendor Bytemobile means it will be ready to win share off its rivals when the demand for 4G services takes off.

The virtualisation giant announced yesterday that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held Bytemobile for an undisclosed sum.

Citrix said the deal would allow it to tap into the foothold Bytemobile has in the mobile network operators market, where its products are used by 130 companies across 60 countries.

The market for the combined proposition will be Vodafone, O2 and Everything Everywhere who are already investing in network optimisation solutions.

The acquisition is expected to close during July or August of 2012, when Bytemobile will become part of the service provider platforms team within the Citrix Cloud Networking Product Group.

Speaking to IT Pro, Damian Saunders, director of the Citrix Cloud Platforms Networking Group, said the deal should allow the two firms to displace several other vendors who provide infrastructure services to mobile network operators.

"The market for the combined proposition will be Vodafone, O2 and Everything Everywhere who are already investing in a variety of network optimisation solutions from a variety of vendors, but Bytemobile provides a single product that can cover that," claimed Saunders.

Using Bytemobile's single product instead of multiple offerings made by several vendors should lower the total cost of ownership for network operators, he added.

"There is not another vendor in the market that can offer what [Citrix and Bytemobile] can, and there are vendors out there that we can displace."

He also claimed the merger should put Citrix in an enviable market position once the demand for 4G services takes off within the enterprise market.

"[The demand] for 4G will hit consumers first, but businesses will want to understand how they can get better value out of their investments in mobility," he explained.

"When that happens, we will be in a position to offer a very meaningful solution to the operators."

Saunders said the company is confident that the majority of Bytemobile's staff will stay on at Citrix, once the integration is complete.

"If you look at the acquisitions we have made in the past, we've done a very good job of retaining key talent. We acquired [cloud networking vendor] NetScaler in 2005 and 75 per cent of the engineering talent we gained through that acquisition are still employed by Citrix today," he said.

"The growth we've seen in all our products, particularly mobile, should also allow us to retain and recruit new talent."

The two firms have also been technology partners since the beginning of the year, with Citrix supplying the underlying hardware for Bytemobile's adaptive network traffic T-Series product line.

As a result, Saunders said a lot of the groundwork, from a "technology integration point of view", has already taken place.

Dell has launched a new rack-mounted workstation that can support four concurrent graphics sessions.

The product was originally launched last year, but has only just received certification from Citrix to run a multi-GPU pass-through configuration.

This means that four XenDesktop sessions can run from one machine for four users performing graphics-heavy tasks.

"The Dell Precision R5500 offers the highest user density available on a XenServer certified platform for XenDesktop HDX 3D Pro, with four concurrent users per host," said Derek Thorslund, director of product management for HDX technology at Citrix.

"This makes it a very attractive option for customers looking to deliver high-end 3D professional graphics while keeping their intellectual property safe in the datacentre."

The Precision R5500 features a dual-socket Xeon processor supporting up to 192GB memory, as well as six 2.5-inch SAS HDDs or five SATA HDDs. It also boasts four Nvidia Quadro 2000 GPU adapters and runs Citrix XenServer and HDX 3D Pro remote screen technology.

Citrix XenServer with HDX 3D Pro provides the virtualised workstation environment with a dedicated graphics card per user or virtual machine.

This gives the user full access to the graphics card in a virtualised environment. Users can also remotely access the unit via HDX 3D Pro from thin clients, desktops, laptops and mobile devices using the Citrix Receiver app.

The unit is designed for users running 3D workloads. This unit is aimed particularly at organisations in finance, science, engineering, medical, and software development looking to host many users from one workstation.

UK Pricing for the R5500 starts at 1,899.

Hardware giant Dell has reinforced its commitment to desktop virtualisation by launching a bumper crop of new products aimed at enterprise and SMB customers.

The firm has rolled out two new product bundles containing pre-configured Dell servers, which are designed to run virtual desktops powered by either Citrix or VMware.

Dell and Citrix are bringing the benefits of desktop virtualisation to the mass market.

The DVS Enterprise bundle contains Dell EqualLogic storage, a PowerEdge server and PowerConnect network components and is compatible with both Citrix and VMware products.

It is aimed at organisations that require at least 50 desktop virtualisation seats, but Dell claimed it can scale up and support "thousands" more.

The second product bundle, the DVS Simplified Appliance, is designed for use by smaller firms and consists of a Dell server, pre-configured with management software and a Citrix hypervisor.

The company is touting it as an "all-in-one" appliance and claims it can be deployed within hours.

Both products are immediately available to buy from Dell in the UK.

Kumar Goswami, vice president of products at Citrix, said the DVS Simplified Appliance should boost the appeal of desktop virtualisation to firms that have previously lacked the resources needed to adopt it.

"Combining the simplicity of the solution with the market presence that Dell has in the desktop space, we are excited about the opportunity to reshape the desktop virtualisation market," he added.

Dell has also announced plans to launch a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) product next quarter, based on Desktone's hosted desktop software platform. This is aimed at both small and large companies.

Peter McKay, chief executive of Desktone, said: "The combined power of Desktone's DaaS platform and Dell's global datacentre intellectual property and services delivers the reality [of] the virtual desktop for everyone."

Citrix has confirmed its acquisition of desktop virtualisation vendor Virtual Computer, several days after rumours linking the two firms appeared online.

The acquisition was announced at Citrix Synergy in San Francisco, but the terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Citrix has built an incredible track record of adding teams like Virtual Computer into the family

Virtual Computer's flagship product is a PC management platform called NxTop. It is used to separate the device's hardware, operating system, applications and user data so that they can be monitored and controlled independently without the need for a network connection.

Rumours about tie-up between the two firms began circulating on social networking site Twitter earlier this week.

However, both parties refused to confirm or deny the story when approached for comment by IT Pro.

In a statement, the virtualisation giant revealed that NxTop will be merged with Citrix's XenClient hypervisor to create a new enterprise version of the product aimed at laptop users. It is expected to ship later this year.

In a blog post, Mitch Parker, group vice president and general manager of client virtualisation at Citrix, said the deal would make it easier for companies to rollout virtual desktops to mobile workers.

"Citrix has built an incredible track record of adding teams like Virtual Computer into the family - teams that fit the culture, share a vision, and quickly become stewards of the Citrix mission," he wrote.

"That can only happen when we [make] an effort to ensure we're adding the right team of people."

Speaking to IT Pro, Guise Bule, chief executive of hosted virtual desktop specialist TuCloud, said the merger should bolster Virtual Computer's appeal to enterprise firms.

"When Kaviza was bought by Citrix, we saw a massive jump in sales of VDI-in-a -Box, and the same should happen to Virtual Computer," he said.

"Enterprise companies won't buy kit without VMware, Microsoft or Citrix's name on the box, so this deal can only mean good news for Virtual Computer."

He claims the deal could also prompt VMware to make some acquisitions in the virtual desktop space.

"VMware will have to respond somehow, because Citrix now has two VDI clients and two client-side hypervisors," said Bule. "What does VMware have apart from View?"

Citrix is said to be on the verge of outing itself as the new owner of desktop virtualisation vendor Virtual Computer.

It is thought the virtualisation giant is planning to announce the news of its latest purchase at its Citrix Synergy event in San Francisco, which is taking place this week.

Virtual Computer's flagship product is a PC management platform called NxTop. It is used to separate the device's hardware, operating system, applications and user data so that they can be monitored and controlled independently without the need for a network connection.

Rumours of a possible tie-up between the two firms began circulating on social networking site Twitter earlier today.

However, both parties are remaining tight-lipped, with representatives from both Virtual Computer and Citrix declining IT Pro's request for comment.

Virtual Computer has been on the vendor's radar for some time, as Citrix was one of several firms who invested $15m in it back in 2009.

If the speculation about the acquisition turns out to be true, the deal will have echoes of Citrix's buyout of SMB-focused VDI vendor Kaviza in May 2011.

Before agreeing to acquire Kaviza, Citrix had invested an unspecified amount of money in the firm the previous year.

More to follow.

Anti-virus specialist Kaspersky has expanded its endpoint security product portfolio to offer VMware users malware protection.

The Kaspersky Security for Virtualisation (KSV) product integrates with the virtualisation giant's vShield Endpoint Security to provide malware protection to every virtual machine on a company's network.

Speaking to IT Pro, Peter Beardmore, senior director of products and services at Kaspersky, said KSV's centralised management console is designed to make life easier for system administrators.

Virtualisation is really starting to come of age in the SMB market.

"Most competing products require some kind of separate management system for each solution," he explained.

"With our central management approach, system administrators can rollout updates from a single console across different virtual, physical and mobile environments."

He said the product launch would also bolster Kaspersky's efforts to gain some ground in the enterprise market.

"VMware's market penetration in the enterprise market is one of the reasons we decided to work with them on this," said Beardmore.

"We want to expand into the enterprise, but virtualisation is also really starting to come of age in the SMB market, so it is a good time for us to be expanding our product portfolio."

He also confirmed to IT Pro that Kaspersky is developing similar products for use in Microsoft and Citrix-based virtual environments.

"It is something we intend to do, but we are not in a position at the moment to publicly discuss a timeline or release date," he added.

Citrix has launched the latest version of its NetScaler internet delivery software, promising give enterprise and carrier networks the "elasticity, simplicity and expandability of the cloud."

NetScaler 10 promises to help companies scale up, scale in or scale out their networks as easily as they would with public cloud, according to Citrix.

It will enable enterprises to embrace a cloud-first network design across all service delivery functions... giving IT the control and confidence to take on the transformation to the cloud network era.

The company said the latest release introduces a new feature called "TriScale" technology, which should deliver the capability to scale up the performance of a single appliance for greater elasticity, scale out to expand capacity by deploying NetScaler appliances in a unified cluster, and scale in by consolidating multiple networking functions into a single NetScaler service delivery platform to simplify network infrastructure.

Citrix claimed the solution would also enable datacentre and cloud managers to provide a comprehensive set of network-based services that are flexible enough to handle the demands of even the most intensive application or service in the most efficient way possible.

The new release brings some 160 new features with it, including built-in cloud connectivity with Citrix CloudBridge, so customers could extend enterprise datacentres into external clouds with security, performance and manageability.

It also boasts new capabilities to deliver virtual desktops with Citrix XenDesktop, including support for smartcard authentication for secure access to virtual desktops, and policy management that separates virtual desktop management from on-going network administration tasks.

"[NetScaler 10 will] enable enterprises to embrace a cloud-first network design across all service delivery functions including cloud connectivity, security and visibility, giving IT the control and confidence to take on the transformation to the cloud network era," said Sunil Potti, vice president and general manager of the NetScaler product group at Citrix.

The software is available immediately, with list prices starting at $2,000 and at no additional charge for existing Citrix NetScaler customers with a valid NetScaler maintenance agreement. Citrix TriScale clustering capabilities are currently offered in controlled availability.

Citrix users need to start migrating to the latest edition of its application delivery platform, XenApp, as the End of Life (EoL) date for earlier versions of the product approaches.

The virtualisation giant has been calling on end users to upgrade to Citrix XenApp 6.5 since 2009, when it was announced that several versions of the product will enter EoL in March 2013.

The product is used by companies to host and manage corporate applications on central servers that can then be streamed for use on other devices.

There are very high densities of XenApp users across Europe and the UK that will be affected by this.

With less than a year to go until time is called on this first tranche of XenApp versions, end users are being urged to upgrade.

Speaking to IT Pro, David Cumberworth, vice president for sales in Northern Europe at storage optimisation vendor Atlantis Computing, said XenApp EoL could be an issue for large numbers of UK firms.

"There are very high densities of XenApp users across Europe and the UK that will be affected by this," said Cumberworth.

"[On top of this] everyone has to move off [Microsoft's] Windows Server 2003 platform by 2015. There is a lot of work that needs to be done to [move] existing XenApp farms onto the Windows 2008 version and upgrade them to XenApp 6.5."

Sam Routledge, solutions director at Citrix partner Softcat, told IT Pro that end of life warnings often go unnoticed by end users, leaving enterprises exposed to support problems.

"The issue with XenApp is that a lot of organisations have rolled it out for a particular application. It solves the problem and they almost forget it is there," he explained.

"I'm not sure many end users take much notice of product roadmaps and you would be surprised by the number of them that don't realise that parts [of their IT estate] could be heading for End of Life."

In a statement to IT Pro, John Fanelli, vice president of product marketing, enterprise desktops and applications at Citrix, said the need to upgrade should come as no surprise to most users.

"Citrix maintains and regularly communicates End of Life schedules for all our software products with each new release," said Fanelli. "In fact, our major release lifecycles are generally four and a half years, which exceeds the industry standard for being enterprise-ready, based on Gartner research."

Even so, the vendor is encouraging end users to crack on with XenApp 6.5 upgrades because of the extra functionality this version offers.

"XenApp 6.5 enhances the end user experience, [has] more than 150 new features and [has] an interface optimised for mobile devices, empowering end users to be more productive with their tablets and smartphones," said Fanelli.

"We consistently listen to and work with our customers to establish migration timelines that suit their needs, and encourage them to migrate to the latest version so they can take advantage of the new innovations being delivered in our products," he said.

Meanwhile, Cumberworth said IT departments should seize on XenApp upgrades to ramp up their adoption of virtual desktops and other related technologies.

"Most XenApp implementations have remained on physical servers, as they were put in place before large-scale virtualisation projects took off," he said. "So moving to a virtual platform, as part of an upgrade, is seen as a smart investment."