Cisco and Citrix Transition to the Mobile Cloud

Cisco and Citrix recently announced that they intend to expand their desktop virtualization partnership to the mobile cloud. According to research firm Visiongain, mobile cloud services are expected to amount to more than $45 billion by 2016. "On the enterprise side, mobile cloud services are changing the entire structure of the IT industry. This is where the greatest action in terms of revenues generated and technological changes will take place," the firm said.

The two companies both believe that the IT industry is at the dawn of a new era that will involve the transition to the mobile cloud. They intent to assist business and service provider clients to transform their businesses by creating innovative technologies for the mobile-cloud transition.

Cisco and Citrix are jumping into this expanding market with their launch of a mobile cloud extension. The two IT forerunners have developed a virtual desktop product that unifies Cisco's Virtualization Experience Infrastructure with Citrix’s XenDesktop. Since forming the partnership, the two companies have supplied small and large companies with thousands of virtual desktops.

Joe Skorupa, vice president at Gartner, commented that the "[n]exus of converging forces of social, mobile, cloud and information is dramatically changing data center architectures and how services are delivered. The next generation network has to incorporate best-in-class application delivery controller capabilities, integrated into a services architecture that is orchestrated at cloud-scale."

The Cisco-Citrix partnership focuses on three main areas: cloud orchestration, cloud networking and mobile work styles. Cisco is set to expand its L4-L7 services in cloud infrastructure and data centers into a fully integrate, multi-service system.

As part of the joint effort, Cisco and Citrix will merge the Citrix NetScaler application delivery controller with Cisco network and security services, such as Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance and Cisco Wide Area Application Services. The integration of Citrix XenServer and Cisco Nexus 1000V is intended to provide customers with the ability to build clouds using open source technology.

Cisco and Citrix also claim that they intend to develop a consolidated cloud product for businesses as well as service providers. The product will include components of Cisco Open Network Environment, Cisco Unified Computing System, Cisco Nexus Series switching and the Citrix CloudPlatform.

Keeping up with the latest trends in BYOD, Cisco and Citrix are working together to develop a product that will provide mobile users with completely secure access to voice, data, apps and collaboration services from any mobile device. The new product will combine Cisco Jabber client, with the Citrix Receiver and Citrix CloudGateway. (CU) Link