Hello World! This must be one of the strangest feelings I have had in my career, as for the first time I am now on the other side of the fence. My name is Harry Labana, it's a beautiful Sunday morning and after a crazy first week I am getting a chance to reflect on my first week at Citrix as the new CTO of the XenApp product group. So to begin, here's a little background to my story. I grew up in the UK of Indian decent and after working for a few years in the UK after University, I spent the last 13 years traveling the canyons of Wall Street with various firms, the last 9 of which have been as a Vice President with Goldman Sachs leading and working on numerous infrastructure, software development and management initiatives.

In particular, I have focused very heavily in the Windows world, and have been through the gamut of real world challenges this brings. From software distribution/packaging, OS upgrades, provisioning, software development, server/application/client virtualization, migrations/integrations, fair share of disasters, hardware, remote access, hosted applications and of course virtual desktops- I think I got most of it - I have been beaten into understanding the realities of execution responsibility at global scale. Fortunately, over the last few years I've also had the opportunity to work with many of the leading established vendors and emerging startups in the Application and Desktop virtualization industry and this has allowed me to learn from smart people with so many perspectives. By virtue of working in financial services, I've also been able to refine these perspectives by talking with investors, analysts and bankers in this space which has equipped me to be a VERY vocal Citrix Customer Council member for a number of years. So I guess Citrix had enough and decided to allow me to help chart their future direction, which is an immensely exciting opportunity, for which I am grateful and where I hope to make a difference by bringing a seasoned customer perspective.

As I reflect on what's happened in our industry over the years, a key observation is how I have seen Citrix technologies evolve from the early adoption days in the 90's as a band aid solution, to many customers now using Citrix as a strategic delivery platform and even greater numbers now considering the technology for the very first time. It is these early customer thought leaders that have done some really amazing things with the technology and enabled us to become a 1.6 billion dollar company by creating so much value for their clients. It seems to me that we are now also at the early stages of the next innovation cycle and early adopters are catching on. I recall sitting at a Synergy session in Houston last year where the topic was a discussion on Desktop Virtualization. I remember what felt like a cynical question about who's actually doing this and a call for a raise of hands. There was silence in the room and I got a nudge from one of my former team mates, and I raised my hand. I won't get into details, but the point is that I think customer thought leaders have and will continue to innovate and find use cases and solutions that we have not even conceived of yet because they are looking to build competitive advantage for their firms because they are driven by an opportunistic mentality that looks beyond teething constraints. Over time this innovation diffuses to the masses, and that's ok in many cases and lost opportunity for others. Working with customers and the broader community, I am convinced that we will continue to evolve our products to enable broader adoption of our technology stack so customers can solve real world problems.   

As I alluded to, I think it's very easy to play cynic, and I could have easily written an article about stuff many vendors can't do or theorize what will happen or what will not happen. I have learned that to build real world solutions requires skill, experience, judgment and the courage to reach out to customers and users who want to be part of the solution. I hope that many of you will be comfortable reaching out to me harry.labana@citrix.com and telling me what you really think as we build upon our current success and evolve our story. I promise I will incorporate your views into my thinking even if I don't agree.

Hi Everyone,

Just two days ago we released the Citrix Receiver 1.0.1 to AppStore, the rockstar feature for this release was the inclusion of Access Gateway Enterprise Support.

Today we were able to identify a bug on the Citrix Receiver app that affect users running NetScaler 9.1, causing the application to suddenly exit.

Gladly right after identifying the bug we were able to quickly fix it, so a new build (v1.0.2) has been produced, tested and will be submitted today to Apple. Expect an update to be available in the next few days.

In the meantime for admins and users attempting to deploy the Receiver with AGEEs, follow the steps provided in the Admin Guide. The Citrix Receiver for iPhone Admin Guide can be downloaded here. Setup steps in the document work perfectly for users running AGEE 8.x and AGEE 9.0.

For help and questions, don't hesitate to visit our support forums or feel free to send me a direct email

best,
Gus

twitter.com/guspinto

Hi all,

Just a quick post to let you all know that we have now released the new version of the Citrix Receiver for iPhone.

Version 1.0.1 has hit the AppStore and supports Citrix Access Gateway Enterprise Edition connectivity (as well as Standard Edition from the v1.0 release).

We have also released an Administrator's Guide for the Citrix Receiver for iPhone. It is available here, and is aimed to assist you in configuring your gateways and delivery center to allow for connections over the internet.

As always, if you have any issues, suggestions or questions, please don't hesitate to leave us a message on the forums and we'll do our best to help you out.

Regards,

Adam

twitter.com/adamjaques

Hi Everyone,

I would like to take a moment and introduce you to the Citrix Receiver for iPhone Admin guide. This document will come handy when planning for iPhone deployments in your company. Inside you can find:

• Product Requirements

• How to configure iPhone secure access via:
  • Access Gateway Strandard Edtion
  • Access Gateway Enterprise Edtion
  • Citrix Secure Gateway

• How to provide access information to end users

• Basic troubleshooting steps

• Known Issues

Download the Citrix Receiver for iPhone Admin Guide

best,
Gus

twitter.com/guspinto

Platform support

• Added support for iPhone OS 3.0

• Support for Access Gateway Enterprise Edition  <-- Yay!
   

Usability Improvements

• 3x improvement in time for App list retrieval

• Visual feedback for mouse clicks

• When the keyboard is visible (during the session) the session can be scrolled up so that the keyboard does not obscure the session

• When a phone call arrives, the on screen icons are rearranged to appear in the correct locations
   

Security Improvements

• User's password is stored in the built-in iPhone keychain
  
  

---

Download Citrix Receiver 1.0.1 : AppStore (via iTunes)
For more Technical details visit : http://community.citrix.com/iphone

best,
Gus

twitter.com/guspinto

I presented this week at the iPhone Developer Summit iPhone Developer Summit an alternative option of app development for the iPhone or any mobile device. The basic premise is to use the Tools or Development platforms you allready know to modify or build applications that can optimized for viewing on the iPhone yet actually run on XenApp servers within the datacenter.
The concept was very well received by non-developer IT Pro's and developers that are experts in other platforms, now trying to get their head around Objective C and other iPhone specific considerations. For the existing iPhone Developers the concept was foriegn and they remained skeptical. Thats OK, there is lots of room for more native iPhone apps and reason's to go mobile. As soon as users get the taste of leaving their laptop home there will allways be all those other app's or docs they will want access to. For help on getting started go to our Page on CDN

Demonstrations of Apps using these concepts available on CitrixCloud.net

1. In the left pane of the Advanced Configuration tool, select Policies.
2. From the Contents tab, select the policy you want to apply.
3. From the Actions menu, select Policy > Apply this policy to.
4. In the Policy Filters dialog box, select Client Name.
5. Select Filter based on client name.
6. Select Add to add specific client names. Type Xen_iPhone* and enter. Make sure Allow is selected in the Client Name filters window.

Here are some example of things you can change, control and optimize for iPhone users:

• Remove Visual Effect like wallpaper
• Control session limits (e.g. virtual channel controls for clipboard, sound, com, display, etc.)
• Control client devices (Audio, drives, ports, etc.)
• Control encryption
• Assign a service level 

Now, bear in mind... I haven't played with this extensively so some of these settings may not even affect the iPhone user simply because the feature is not available for Receiver for iPhone (e.g. some SpeedScreen/HDX settings). It doesn't hurt to turn some of these off though and experiment. And the ultimate of course is controlling encryption and security settings. Also, once we release our next rev of the Receiver for iPhone which will have improved support for Access Gateway, I am hoping it will allow the assignment of policies based on Access Gateway connections. So at that point you can filter applications for iPhone users as well as control the experience they have with applications when they connect to a XenApp server.

KEWL!

XenApp on Twitter | XenApp TV-Radio | XenApp Tech Previews

A lot of Buzz is in the air about what Apple is going to release ( or not ) at WWDC next month. As usual Apple has done a great job of keeping people guessing about what will be announced and when it will be available. Since the release of the Citrix Receiver for iPhone there has also been an increased interest in the iPhone for business use and how it can be utilized to be more productive ( and have a little fun ). The interest has also increase the desire for more, lots of people want the iPhone to become the " NirvanaPhone " by adding video and Keyboard capability , but there are other requests as well. " This would be awesome if it only did X ... "

So let's make some predictions and put some numbers to the features and announcements we want at WWDC.

On May 5th, Citrix released Receiver for iPhone 1.0 at Synergy in Las Vegas. Receiver for iPhone is a wonderful testament to the HDX experience we're moving towards. The engineering team involved (winks and nods to Steve Parry, Gus Pinto, Ruiguo Yang, et al) graciously accepted a literal barrage of feedback, input, direction changes, and general user griping about usability for this app. The result is a testament to what's possible when you consider the form factor when porting software to different OS's and adjust to suit. In that same vain, and in conjunction with the Receiver for iPhone, Citrix also released two features called Doc Finder and App Viewer.

Doc Finder

App Viewer

In addition to Doc Finder is another really cool feature called App Viewer. The idea behind App Viewer is simple - make the browser invisible. Contrary to what you might think, many, many customers publish web applications for delivery via XenApp. There are a number of reasons for this but that's another blog post. In any case, publishing web apps to small form factor devices like the iPhone wastes a lot of precious real-estate for browser controls and fields that are built for PC's. For example, a user of a published web app from the iPhone doesn't need the URL bar or the window title bar of Internet Explorer... they just need the page. Plus, if you've created a lightweight page for the web app that is customized for SFF users, they probably don't even need scroll bars. This is where app viewer comes in. It's just a web browser with no controls, fields, buttons, scroll bars, etc. To help you understand it more, think about it this way. There are a lot of apps on the iPhone that are actually web pages. They use the Safari browser but it is invisible. Bank of America is one such application. It's a web page but you wouldn't know because of the way it's presented to you. App Viewer makes this possible for applications that are hosted on XenApp. Essentially, App Viewer preserves the experience that users are already familiar with when they access locally installed web apps on their iPhone. Even better is that App Viewer can be used to deliver hosted web applications running on XenApp to Windows Mobile devices as well. In fact, you can use it with any form factor. It's completely configurable. All you need to do is make sure you have an appropriate application interface for the form factors you want to support.

I'm tellin' ya, the engineering guys that worked on this did a great job thinking outside of the box. If you want to check these features out, visit citrix.com/iPhone for more information.

As you can probably imagine, life in a fast-paced technology company like Citrix can be a little hectic, especially around product launch time and around events like Citrix Synergy. Now picture this...

I'm at Citrix Synergy watching the keynote and all of a sudden I start getting e-mails from Citrites in the audience and back at headquarters who are looking for more information on connecting back to headquarters using our shiny new Citrix Receiver for iPhone. Now, I know that I posted a short document on the step by step process for doing this in our environment.  The problem is that the document was missing a critical piece in it (my fault) and I needed to update it immediately. The show was at the MGM Grand (a huge sprawling hotel in Las Vegas) and my room was pretty far away so it would have taken me 15 minutes to get to my room, 10 minutes to update the doc, and another 15 minutes to get back. I would have missed 40 minutes of the keynote. I had no connectivity from the keynote area except using 3G with my iPhone. What better time to put our new stuff to the test.

So... I logged into our Access Gateway via the Receiver for iPhone and used my domain credentials and RSA token to login and get a list of my apps. I tap Doc Finder, open my instruction doc and edit it using a full version of Microsoft Office. No big deal... just had to add a couple of lines of text. I save it off and then go back to my app list and open Internet Explorer. From there, I visit my Sharepoint site and upload the document. I even manage to make a couple of updates to the web page where it's posted before I sign off and 'reply to all' that the solution has been posted and problem fixed. 

It took me 15 minutes to do it and I didn't miss a single second of opening keynote at Synergy. Sure... you could argue that I needed the exercise and should have walked back to my room but the opening keynote speaker was amazing and I'm happy I didn't go. The Receiver for iPhone allowed me to get my job done in a pinch to keep other employees productive. Now that's value you can take to the bank.

What was my experience like? I imagine there were lots of folks using the Receiver from the keynote over 3G and I was experiencing some sluggish performance but not enough to make the experience unusable. I think we still have a little bit of work to do on click/tap accuracy because there were a couple of times where I had trouble positioning the cursor (it could have also been Sharepoint. On memory, I can't remember where to place the blame ). It took a little bit of practice but I got the hang of it. Thank goodness for Pan and Zoom and copy and paste on the keyboard. The Save button also afforded me a little extra time too. All in all, it worked quite well in the pinch I was in. This is exactly what the Receiver for iPhone was created for.

Now if only Apple would create a cradle that could turn my iPhone into a thin client. That would be awesome!

Learn more at [http://citrix.com/iphone]. 

Hi all,

We have had some great feedback from our v0.9 release of the Citrix Receiver for the iPhone, and whilst you guys have been experimenting with what we have been calling project Braeburn, the team here have been powering on to give you v1.0.

The BIG feature of v1.0 is support for the Citrix Access Gateway Standard Edition with optional two-factor authentication, as well as Secure Gateway support.  We are really excited to give you this feature so you can get to all of your apps published on XenApp over the Internet from anywhere!

A point to note, to install v1.0, please uninstall the Technology Preview (v0.9) from your iPhone first. After doing that, go into the AppStore and install the "Citrix Receiver", future updates will then be automatically delivered without you having to do the uninstall step.

If you haven't seen the Citrix Receiver running on the iPhone, here is a demonstration video I produced for the Tech Preview release, the UI has changed a little, but the concepts and supported gestures are still the same.

Have fun with it, rate it and give us some feedback through the forums.  As you can see from our release rate between v0.9 and v1.0, we are on an accelerated path and we would love to hear your feedback (positive or negative), and any suggestions for future versions.

For more information visit www.citrix.com/iphone

Adam

Citrix just announced the new Citrix Receiver for iPhone. And a companion utility was also released called Citrix Doc Finder. As one of the creators of this utility, I will explain some of the history and rationals behind this product.

The leap from no access to access anywhere

Together with Receivers for other mobile devices, Citrix technology now allows you to access applications not available to mobile devices before.

You may wonder how usable the applications designed for desktops are going to be on small screens. It is surprisingly usable especially on the iPhone with the relatively large screen and multi-touch capabilities. Give it a try yourself. It certainly beats not having access at all.

The challenges with fitting desktop applications in a small screen

But can we do better? Certainly. Take windows file explorer for example. Although powerful, the interface is not ideal for mobile devices. For instance, the fonts are too small and especially not good enough for my fingers. I wouldn't blame my finger being too fat As the result, opening a file takes too much scroll, zooming and panning than necessary.

One solution "re-skin"

What if we modify the user interface to optimize it for mobile devices? Many web sites have mobile sites. But I am not aware of any good existing examples of mobile version of windows applications yet. Are you?

Why file explorer?

There are many windows applications we can "re-skin". Given that most people are likely going to want access their corporate documents on mobile devices, it seems logical to create a mobile version of windows explorer as the first example.

Why not implement Doc Finder as a native iPhone application

Yes, it is possible and I've given it serious consideration.

I can think of two possible approaches of a native iPhone implementation. Both have the advantages such as utilizing the iPhone graphics, animation etc. Both have their drawbacks though.

• Download files to iPhone and open it natively.
  Cons: Poses additional security risks since files need to leave corporate network. And iPhone's capability to handle many file types is still lacking

• Download directory and file information only and use XenApp to open selected file.
  Cons: Requires a web service which needs to be accessible outside corporate network. May require changes to core XenApp product. It seems more complex than simply deploying another modified application on XenApp.

More importantly I would like to help non-iPhone mobile users as well. Implementing Doc Finder as a windows application hosted on XenApp gives me the advantage of serving a broader mobile user base with a single code base.

Since I know windows development pretty well already, I can build Doc Finder quickly. It would be a daunting task to build a separate application for many different mobile platforms.

My development experience.

It took me only a few days to come up with a functional prototype. And it proved so useful and it was productized in a very short amount of time.

Where to find more information

Here is a demo video of Citrix Receiver and the Doc Finder. Doc Finder section starts at around 5:20.

Here is the direct link to that part of the video.

Here is the complete video demo.

Doc Finder is featured in the free demo at CitrixCloud.net. Please give it a try. For more information and to download it, please visit Doc Finder community site. Your comments and suggestions are appreciated. I encourage you to use this user forum for Doc Finder related discussions.

What's next?

But wait, similar type of optimization should be possible to many other types of applications as well both windows applications and web applications. I will leave that subject to another blog.

Ray (Ruiguo) Yang
Check out my other blogs
Subscribe to my blog RSS feed

It's here - The Citrix Service Provider program AND Receiver for iPhone 1.0. This is the most exciting announcement since I've been here at Citrix. 

Can you imagine the power of the most successful application delivery technology on the planet coupled with the highest growth mobile device on the planet?  We've been working on both at Citrix for a while and now they are both available together. 

Today Citrix announced the creation of a new licensing approach for service providers.  The Citrix Service Provider program that enables hosting services companies to access our technology in a subscription licensing arrangement to rapidly expand the delivery of applications for Windows based Software as a Service.  This program is a monthly "active" subscriber pricing and licensing model that gives flexibility with no upfront cost. 

We've spoken to several hosting service providers and ISVs who have been looking for a solution like this for years.  The results of the poll in one of my past blogs revealed that over 32% of those responding thought Citrix should have a subscription based licensing program and others wrote in that the program should include at a minimum both XenApp and XenDesktop.  Well we heard you and have included these products as well as XenServer.  You can find out more about this program and the details for it in the partners section of citrix.com. 

Now imagine the power of a service provider license agreement with the combined power of a universal client that allows access to any Windows application on any device.  Have you got that picture in your mind?  Now imagine turning those applications loose on the hottest mobile device on the planet... you guessed it, the iPhone!  If you want to experience it, just go get it at the Citrix web site!   

With the power of what end users have been asking us for in the iPhone and the ability to drive software as a service through subscription licensing, Citrix provides the only complete solution for service providers to give access to any application on any device.  Oh and obviously the same HDX experience is consistent on Desktops, Laptops, Smart Phones and Thin Clients... and all of this is now in the Citrix Service Provider program! 

You asked for it... and we delivered!

Twitter

The Citrix Receiver for iPhone 1.0 is now available in the App Store ! This is the product thousands of our users have been ( impatiently ) waiting for. The 1.0 release includes support for Access Gateway and RSA 2 Factor authentication enabling secure access over WiFi or 3G networks anywhere.

To provide some history on what influenced this new Citrix Receiver look back to last year when Apple released the iPhone SDK. We had lots of discussion inside Citrix about the priority and significance of developing a client for the iPhone. Although it was possible to access Citrix servers from mobile devices in the past, the user experience was poor due to screen size, slow networks and cumbersome input. The iPhone finally provided a platform that had a relatively large screen, a 3G network and the awesome gesture feature that made panning and zooming usable.

So we knew we could do it, the question was should we do it. Beyond the typical business case with projections of users/licenses and data points of individual customer requests we did an experiment by posting the question to the entire community. As you may have noticed this single blog post now has over 200,000 views and 200+ comments.

Interestingly the comments came not only from our common base of IT pro's but a surprising amount came from end users as well. These are just a few examples of what we heard..

" Hospitalists want to use this.  We have Cerner here, and I need Citrix working to connect to it.  I would use this 50 times a day.  Right now I have to repeatedly sign in to different terminals.  The iPhone is the right form factor for this.  Laptops / tablets are too bulky for doctors to carry around -- we often do not have a surface to put them on. ..David"

"It's not just the medical community.  I'm Director of IT for a large chemical company. I have a highly mobile user base - engineers visiting the production facilities, etc.  Currently they are all armed with Blackberry devices.  That's great for email only..... but forget attachments or getting into some of the apps we currently host in a Citrix environment (such as our production scheduling tool).  An iPhone client solves these problems.  We'd be off the Blackberry platform and onto the iPhone with Citrix very quickly. By the way, we have a huge investment in the Citrix platform, and it's getting larger - more and more of our users are moving away from laptops to thin clients.  A Citrix client on the iPhone will come close to eliminating the need for any laptops at all from most users. Do it, and do it fast ! "

"It's not just the medical or chemical companies, I am the CIO for a logistics company, and we do all of our global operations using MetaFrame, and having it on my iPhone really helps."

Regarding the use cases, the blog comments describe many of them. I think it's mostly a matter of how mobile the users are as to how often this client will be used. For office based workers that have an iPhone it may be a just another cool app helps out in a pinch. But for the increasing mobile workforce that absolutely needs access to apps & data anywhere ... it's priceless... ( just like when you need to get to a server and you only have your phone with you) It seems that most everyone would like to be able to leave their laptop home, myself included.

 So let us know what you think, do you agree with the rest of the Citrix Community? Does it live up to your expectations ? Download the Citrix Receiver from the App Store and try it out. If you are not ready to put it in your production environment yet, register for the free demo at CitrixCloud.net and test the sample apps plus the great new App we built called Doc Finder. If you want to build your own environment to test your own apps try the C3 Lab in Amazon EC2.

For more information, news, questions and suggestions go to;

Community.Citrix.com/iPhone

Citrix.com/iPhone

From your iPhone, check out;

m.iphone.citrix.com

For those who want an unscripted and behind the scenes look at Citrix Synergy 2009 we have made the Citrix Synergy Underground 2009 website! In the Synergy Underground, you will find pictures, Twitter feeds, and videos shot by the Synergy Underground team! During Synergy, the Underground team will be providing interviews, demos, and backstage footage and pictures for everyone to view.

We already have pictures of the construction of Synergy along with the ever growing Twitterati community around #citrixsynergy.

Join the fun and see the "other side" of Citrix Synergy 2009!

Join the fun here.

This is a follow up to my earlier blog.

Do you wish to use your iPhone to access Flash based applications? So far you are out of luck. According to the recent news article from CNET, "Flash 10 coming to most smartphones in 2010". And iPhone is not on the list.

But why wait? With the upcoming Citrix receiver for iPhone, you will be able to run Flash based applications not only from iPhone but also from many other popular mobile devices. Initially the focus will be to support business applications.

The Citrix technology also adds another additional layer of security by only transmitting the display to the mobile devices. A typical flash based business intelligence report may contain sensitive data. If downloaded directly to a mobile device, the data may be vulnerable to leaks. For business users,the added security may be important.

Here is a quick preview of what is to come.

Here is the iPhone friendly version

A business intelligence application is demonstrated above. You can find the demo application at this Adobe web site.

If you know any Flash enabled web application/sites that may be useful when accessed from iPhone, could you let me know by posting comments?

Please check out our iPhone project community site for more details.

Ray (Ruiguo) Yang
Check out my other blogs

Software as a Service.  Sounds like it would be a pretty easy concept to understand.  But when we look under the hood we find that there are three differing perspectives. 

At a hundred thousand feet SaaS is a buzz word for Wall Street and investors to get excited over.  It is the intersection of off premise hardware managed by others at a location (either virtual or physical) with dedicated resources which may also be a part of the larger Internet Cloud which combines Web Hosting with shared applications.  Wow!  That's a mouthful.  No wonder so many tech savvy analysts are so excited about it.  There are enough "high hit" Google terms there to start a search engine frenzy.

The investment community represents the first of three perspectives for SaaS.  Trying to predict what the future will hold and which companies have the technology to capture more customer wallet share in the ever growing information age.  The view from this perspective is about the value of software.  Specifically will software continue to hold its value and thus hold up the value of those Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) who produce it?

The second perspective is that of the software industry itself.  The opportunity is with those software companies who are blessed with no legacy code and have built their product for a distribution that takes advantage of the open Internet.  From this perspective the sky is the limit and exposure or awareness of the product is the key to attracting revenues from the mass market.  On the other hand ISVs who have invested millions of dollars in their code base and it has evolved from dedicated operating systems are not so lucky.  From their perspective SaaS could be the next crushing blow that renders their code obsolete.

Lastly we have to look at the guy who pays the bill.  The end user and for the purpose of this article, I'm going to limit that to the small and medium business.  After all, if the SMB actually makes up 80% of the total number of end points in the world, one would think that this is the most important segment to address, right?  From their perspective, SaaS doesn't matter.  All they want to know is, "how am I going to get my software applications running without an IT staff or with limited IT capabilities".  In fact if Geek Squad could figure out a way to supply physical services to every small business in the universe and manage applications on-the-fly, this would be the definition an SMB would use for Software as a Service.

If we start from the guy who pays the bills, the world of SaaS looks something like this.  A simple, secure and cost effective way to access applications and data from any device in any location.  Some ISVs understand this definition and are becoming wildly successful, because they understand the first order of business is satisfying the end customer's needs.  After all, he is paying the bill.  In the world of communication and collaboration we see products such as GoToMeeting and Microsoft Live.  The hard truth is that these products sell the best by circumventing the current IT professionals.  They are completely end user focused, have a specific use and are easily accessed from any device in any location.  In the world of Customer Relationship Management, Salesforce.com is the 800 lb gorilla.  Once again, simple to use and accessible.

But what of the thousands of applications that were built specifically for the desktop or dedicated server Operating Systems?  Are these guys just out of luck?  Will the millions of users who currently use these products suddenly stop and go to their web application cousin created by these new and emerging software vendors?  Maybe.  Eventually.  But not tomorrow.  Not in a year and maybe not for the next 5-10 years.  There are a hundred reasons why this is true.  The most compelling is risk and reliability.  The mass market by definition is not a part of early adoption.  In fact, according to Geoffrey Moore, we have an entire chasm to cross before there is mass market adoption of something as disruptive as a web app only business model.  If this were not the case, Google would be the name on your phone bill today instead of AT&T, everyone would be driving a Prius and Cable TV would have been killed by IPTV.  But these things take time and what is needed is a way to bridge the gap.

Most people in the IT industry don't think of Citrix as a mass market product company.  And since SaaS is typically associated with the mass market, don't think of Citrix playing well in this space.  That's because we have spent the bulk of our sales expertise and adoption in the large enterprise market.  Why?  Because it has taken 20 years to cross the chasm of server based computing for the mass market.  But what most people don't realize is that Citrix started out by creating products designed for low bandwidth, high latency, and low power CPU environments.  These are the basic tenants of the mass market.  Our core product, XenApp has only been enhanced for these tenants over the past 20 years.  That's why we have deployments of up to 50,000 end points within our current customer base.  No one else in the world has this type of delivery system to match the needs of the end user in the mass market for the thousands of applications that are not web based.  So as ISVs continue to look at the mounting problem of servicing the end customer in the SMB segment, Citrix will provide a simple, elegant solution to the perspective of the guy who is paying the bill... A simple, secure and cost effective way to access applications and data from any device in any location.

I wouldn't be surprised if Citrix is seen in a new light over the next couple of years.  After all, we can bridge the gap that crosses the chasm.

Twitter

Besides demoing the Citrix Receiver for iPhone at MacWorld, I got a chance to check out the exhibit hall to look for other interesting products, here is what I found:

Video for the Nirvana Phone ? The MicroVision projector looked really promising, right now works well for movies in the right lighting conditions, the text clarity is not ready for applications though. Rev 2 maybe ?

The latest MyVu looked really good including text. This is ready when we get application Video out from the iPhone.

How about a Keyboard Dock for the iPhone ... I was hopeful but no luck. I did find a developer who has a keyboard working with a hacked iPhone , couldn't get him on camera though..

The "InYourFace" clamp to hold your iPhone anywhere, I liked this a lot !

xDock another desktop stand, looks cool and works pretty well.

iRecorder rips any video right to your iPhone

Play tunes on your iPhone

Do you wish to use your iPhone to access Silverlight enabled web sites? Silverlight is growing in popularity. Check out the Silverlight showcase.

While currently iPhone doesn't support Silverlight natively, you will soon be able to view Silverlight powered cool web sites via Citrix Receiver for iPhone. Here is a quick preview of what is to come.

Did I forget iPhone doesn't support Flash? Here is an iPhone friendly version. I will blog about Flash on iPhone soon.

A business intelligence application is demonstrated above. You can find the demo application here.

Some Silverlight applications will work better on iPhone than others. But at least you have an option to use them now. Citrix also enabled opportunities to optimize Silverlight enabled web sites for iPhone. More on that later.

If you know any Silverlight enabled web application/sites that may be useful when accessed from iPhone, could you let me know by posting comments?

Please check out our iPhone project community site for more details.

Ray (Ruiguo) Yang
Check out my other blogs

For those looking for some new news from MacWorld, plus may want to hear from random attendees what they thought of delivering Windows apps to the iPhone. We took to the floor and asked, here is what they said :

I am really impressed .. I see this for remote sales reps

I can use this for document access ?   ... check

Holy ... is that real windows office 2007 ? that's awsome !

That's the only beef I have with the iPhone is I can't do my Microsoft stuff .. great job !

Yes there were those purists that we scared away at the thought of Windows on the iPhone ... plus some others that said "why would you ever need that ? "  For those with real jobs, they got it right away...