Citrix Lays Out Its Vision At Synergy Event In Berlin

At the European Citrix Synergy conference in Berlin, Citrix CEO Mark Templeton announced new products in the three main areas of the company’s operations.

High definition video conferencing is being added to the GoTo series of products: Meeting, Webinar and Training. The HDFaces feature uses Citrix Multistream HD to display up to six high resolution streams, up to a total resolution of 1920×960 pixels.

The add-on is in beta at the moment but Citrix announced that it will be made available in the first quarter of 2011.

XenDesktop 5 Virtually Here

The release of Citrix XenDesktop 5 was the main event of Synergy but a definite date was not announced, just a promise that it would appear before the end of this year.

An attractive boast was that installation only takes ten minutes and that it will be easier to manage. To deliver on this promise, an enterprise will have to already have the basic infrastructure prepared, such as a networked infrastructure incorporating Microsoft Active Directory services.

Set-up administration is assisted by the Desktop Studio console where tasks such as building, testing, deploying and rolling back images have been reduced to just a few clicks. This was in response to customer feedback that last year’s release of XenDesktop 4 was inhibited by the complexity of rolling out the software.

Citrix’s aim, the company said, is to make XenDesktop simpler to deploy and to use. The introduction of a single sign-on environment has been introduced to make access to applications simpler. It can also be linked to automatically open access to on-demand services such as Salesforce.com.

Citrix Receiver

In the mobile arena, Citrix Receiver has been given greater attention. Templeton sees this as an important part of his infrastructure of the future. He described this as “three screens and a cloud”.

The cloud, private and public or a mix of the two, would be the central core. Another bulwark would be the powerful processing environments behind the screens of desktop and laptop systems.

Smartphones from every manufacturer would fit in seamlessly and feed off this for email and other services, such as contacts and calendaring. A small degree of application work, data entry and collaboration would also be handled.

The tablet arena seemed to hold most promise for Templeton, mainly because it is effectively a mobile thin client. He sees this, in the Citrix definition of a virtualised environment, potentially as the main business tool.

Citrix announced that Project GoldenGate will be extending and improving Receiver. The aim is to automatically enable applications to be touchscreen enabled – even if touch is not a part of the original application.

As an initial move, Citrix Receiver has been extended to support Samsung’s Galaxy products, including the Galaxy Tab tablet.