Citrix upgrades complete portfolio from datacentre to desktop

Citrix chief executive Mark Templeton has used the opening keynote of the annual Citrix Synergy conference to announce upgrades to the company's core lines and new tools for IT managers.

Analysts may have predicted that the industry is entering the post-PC era, but Templeton said that it is the three PC era of personal cloud, private cloud, and public cloud.

Cloud services will have to be enabled for any device as widely as possible, he explained, since IT consumers are increasingly bringing their own devices to work.

"You can fight or embrace the consumerisation of IT," he said. "We think if you try to fight it, you're betting against experience. Our advice is that we're not going to fight it; we'll feature it and make it work for us."

On the personal cloud front, Citrix gave the first look at XenClient 2, the upgrade to its desktop virtualisation software released last year. Over 100,000 copies have been downloaded so far, the company said.

XenClient 2 will now work with hardware not using Intel's vPro standard, although functionality will be slightly limited. The upgrade opens up over 40 million new devices to the software, according to Templeton.

Citrix will release a specially hardened version of the software next month. XenClient XT is built to provide the best possible security and data protection, and will be sold predominantly to the government, finance and pharmaceutical industries.

"All three have high performance applications and want tight security since the cost of a security problem is huge," Templeton told V3.co.uk. "It's kind of overkill for most companies."

Pricing is yet to be announced, but will reflect the increased management costs of the platform. The security features it uses may eventually filter down to other XenClient platforms, Citrix said.

Templeton also showed the first public beta of the firm's latest GoToMeeting software, which allows videoconferencing in high definition.

Enabling personal cloud applications like this is key to user support, according to Templeton, and they must be easy enough to use without training.