Businesses today are under intense pressure to respond to the demand for consumer-like apps and user experience.
So said Brendan McAravey, country manager at Citrix SA, yesterday in an interview with ITWeb. McAravey was giving a round-up of the Citrix Synergy conference the company recently hosted in Orlando where it unveiled its latest offerings in response to the rising trend of IT consumerisation.
He pointed out the new reality is employees need to access their data as well as personal and business applications anytime on their preferred device. These applications can be cloud applications, Windows applications or even personal applications like Facebook and Twitter, he said.
End-users are also demanding the same user experience they get from personal applications on business applications, he added.
According to McAravey, modern workspaces are no longer confined to a physical location or a specific device; thus, businesses must provide the digital tools users need to get their job done from anywhere.
He also noted the bring-your-own-device trend is adding more pressure to the already stressed IT departments.
"More people than ever before are leaving the corporate office behind to work remotely," said McAravey.
"To address this, the technology industry has had to move fast and in just the past year, we have seen acquisitions, apps and services developed all with a single goal to help make people productive, securely, from anywhere."
He believes as the need to work remotely increases, technology will have to continue to improve.
For progressive companies, McAravey said, remote working is nothing new. But over the past four years, the expectations around mobility have grown.
In a recent study into the work-life balance of South African office workers, conducted by Citrix, 54% of workers indicated they would be very likely or slightly likely to work from home if their employer allowed it, he continued.
"People are demanding the ability to work from locations that best enable them to get their jobs done. And with this comes increased job satisfaction while also delivering a more flexible and agile organisation that is better equipped to deal with the increased speed of change in today's business climate."
Today's employee has at least three devices they use to get their work done - some personal, others corporate-owned, he said, adding each of these devices is from a different hardware provider with a different version of an operating system (OS).
Thus, he fears the thousands of device/OS combinations and the diverse ownership make it nearly impossible to manage each device the way traditional corporate PCs were handled. Instead, he noted, IT will shift focus to service delivery on any device, without worrying about the device itself.
During the Citrix Synergy event last month, the company unveiled its Citrix Workspace Cloud which it believes can solve some of the challenges IT consumerisation presents.
With Citrix Workspace Cloud, Citrix says it provides partners and businesses with a solution to address the increasing pressure that new devices, apps and work styles are putting on traditional infrastructure.
The Citrix Workspace Cloud creates a new control plane that merges the worlds of on-premises and cloud, allowing IT managers to create secure, mobile workspaces that include desktops, applications and data from whatever infrastructure source best meets their specific needs, McAravey pointed out.
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