Citrix Systems has years of experience delivering apps and data to enterprise PC users. That's not a bad gig, as evidenced by its $12 billion market cap.
Now Citrix is pitching new software to enterprises that use mobile devices. Which is basically every enterprise out there.
Citrix's XenMobile Enterprise, unveiled Wednesday at the opening of its Synergy conference in Los Angeles, works with its virtual desktop software to connect mobile devices with back-end corporate apps and data securely.
This means enterprises can let employees use iPhones, Android devices and Windows Phones without putting their valuable corporate data at risk.
"You can use these devices to drive your business mobile,” Citrix CEO Mark Templeton said in a keynote at the event.
There are tons of other apps that do the same thing—there's a whole market segment called mobile device management. But Citrix is going further by also managing corporate apps and data.
XenMobile includes three apps that Citrix built itself: There's a secure email app, and a mobile web browser that can access company's intranet and other back-end data.
Sharefile, an app for sharing and syncing documents across mobile devices, is also part of the package. The idea behind this app is to keep employees from putting corporate data in cloud storage services like Dropbox.
This is called "shadow IT", and it's another big issue enterprises are facing.
Citrix is also launching its own app store for third party vendors and developers. The company says it'll have around 80 apps when it goes live in late June.
Mobile is a big dilemma for enterprises. It makes employees more efficient, and even happier in some cases. But there are security risks. Bad things can happen to a company when an employee leaves their smartphone in a bar or taxi.
Consumer mobile apps are designed to “talk” to each other and share data. But enterprises want to lock this down. Their nightmare scenario is a customer list from Salesforce.com being pasted into Facebook or another public site.
Citrix says XenMobile can solve this issue. “You want to separate life and work and manage the interaction between apps,” Templeton said. “You don’t want corporate information going out, but you might want personal information coming in.”
The mobile device management tech in XenMobile comes from Citrix's acquisition of Zenprise, a fast growing startup it bought last December.
Citrix says it will ship XenMobile Enterprise late next month. It's priced starting at $65 per user monthly.
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