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Citrix Labs

Site Description:

URL:	labs
Description:	Citrix Labs is the Citrix applied research organization.
Title:	Citrix Labs
Keywords:	Citrix Labs, goldengate, ovf, micro-app
Profile: Citrix Labs Citrix Labs is the Citrix applied research and innovation organization. Citrix Labs has offices in Sydney (Australia), and Redmond (USA), as well as presence in Cambridge (UK), Santa Clara (USA) and Fort Lauderdale (USA). We manage our research by themes. Current themes include: Mobile Devices - One of the most dramatic IT shifts today is the move toward a plethora of permanently connected, touch screen devices in combination with the micro-app. This shift is changing enterprise computing at many levels. Citrix Labs is driving new ways to bring enterprise applications to the mobile device via application remoting. Highlights include 'Project GoldenGate' - a secure email 'lighthouse' application, 'Project Alcatraz' - providing PIN based rapid access to applications, and the umbrella investigation 'Project San Francisco'. Cloud Computing - Citrix is a major vendor in both Software as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service technologies. In Labs we are exploring ways Citrix could leverage ideas and technologies from the 'Platform as a Service' cloud. Systems Management ? Ongoing pressure on IT to reduce costs at the same time as increasing agility implies ever more automation. In this area Citrix Labs is focused on infrastructure innovation that streamlines the management of all Citrix technologies. Microsoft Technology Partnership ? Ensuring that Citrix products are aligned with new technologies and products from our most strategic partner We would love to hear from you about your new and innovative uses of Citrix technology, and any areas you think Citrix should explore for the future. Feel free to air your views on our blog posts or contact us directly at labs@citrix.com.

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Your device will replace your desktop!

The enormous variety of smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices pouring into the market are driving a rare IT transition.

Three market trends bring Citrix into the center of the action:

The emergence of the Micro-App: Applications that are purpose-built for completing a highly focused task on a small-screen, touch-based device.
Secure mobility: Increasing user pressure to access corporate information from mobile devices creates serious security concerns around enterprise data on personal mobile devices.
Device independence: Corporate IT is struggling to deliver uniform business applications and content to an increasing and fragmented range of mobile devices.

The shift from desktops to hand-held internet devices brings a wide range of new challenges: security, regulatory compliance, small screen, and new interface approaches that afford a very different user experience. Citrix is working on a number of fronts to ensure any device can become a viable corporate asset, including the vast array of mobile devices now available to consumers and enterprise users.

Citrix Receiver

A key area of focus for Citrix Labs is Citrix Receiver for mobile devices. Citrix is developing a host of Citrix Receivers to connect mobile devices to XenApp-hosted apps and XenDesktop-hosted desktops in the data center. Citrix Receiver for smartphones includes iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and support for the larger tablet form factors from Apple and Samsung already available for download. This trend is set to continue with a host of new tablets appearing weekly from numerous companies including Dell, and Cisco. Now that the Citrix Receiver has been seeded across these mobile form factors, Citrix Labs are working on experimental versions of Receiver to pioneering new mobile capabilities unique to these devices.

Enterprise Mobility

The use of three types of screen (SmartPhone or small, Tablet or medium and Desktop or large) are fast becoming the norm for accessing enterprise applications and information. The capabilities of each have been likened to different types of meals: info snacking (alert me) on small form factor devices like smartphones and info dining (inform me) on the medium size, tablet form factors. Info creation (empower me), however, remains the province of the larger screen.

While it is possible to deliver existing Windows applications to small screen devices with solutions like XenApp, usability can suffer. This is due to a mismatch between developer assumptions about screen size and the user interface. In many cases panning and zooming the large screen based application around a small screen can be awkward at best. Another challenge is that Windows applications are designed for a high resolution pointing device, not the human finger.

Citrix Labs and the Solutions and Community Development teams are exploring a variety of new approaches and advanced mobile technologies to solve these challenges for users and the IT specialist. These include the following:

Mobile-friendly applications ? Many desktop apps can quite easily be modified to display in multiple window panes that match the target mobile device?s screen resolution (e.g., 320 x 480 for the iPhone). For examples, see Citrix Community posts on mobile-friendly apps and Adam Marano demonstrating this approach.
Nirvana Phone ? Connecting small-screen handset to a full-sized monitor and bluetooth keyboard can turn the mobile device into a full thin-client suitable for accessing virtual applications and desktops delivered by XenApp and XenDesktop. See the Nirvana Phone Reference Architecture and Adam Jaques showing off the NirvanaPhone concept.
Custom viewers that require minimal coding ? Examples of these tools include SoftwareFX PowerGadgets for XenApp, Xcelcius, and Hyperion. See Chris Fleck demonstrating the capabilities of PowerGadgets for XenApp.
Purpose-built Micro-Apps ? Purpose-built Micro Apps are designed for use on small-screen, touch devices. Micro Apps can be built once with standard Windows development tools (Visual Studio, Java, Flash/Flex, Silverlight), run centrally on XenApp, and delivered to any mobile platform with Citrix Receiver. Citrix Labs has a major project underway to enable this new Micro-app development paradigm, known as Project San Francisco

Project San Francisco

The goals for Project San Francisco include:

Championing the use of centrally hosted Windows applications for remote deliver to mobile, touch devices.
Enhancing core Citrix technologies such as ICA / HDX, Receivers, and Server components for the mobile device use case.
Providing to software developers know-how, code snippets, sample applications, API examples for the use of virtual channels to leverage this new mobile application model.

The over arching objective is to greatly improve the user experience and productivity when using mobile devices to access corporate information. San Francisco is comprised of several sub projects. Several have been made public including:

Project GoldenGate ? GoldenGate is an example of a secure, purpose-built, mobile friendly micro-app that is designed to be hosted on XenApp in the data center and delivered out to any mobile device that has Citrix Receiver.
Project Alcatraz - Alcatraz is about optimizing the tradeoffs between security and usability for remote applications. As a part of this objective, Alcatraz will address the need for secure, rapid, and persistent connections and reconnections by providing a simple PIN challenge mechanism once a full domain authentication is established.

As more projects are made public, they will be added to this page. (Note that these are internal project names and do not imply any commitment to release as Citrix product, nor are they likely to relate to any future product names.)

Project GoldenGate

Citrix Labs is developing an example micro-app called "Project GoldenGate" that runs in a Terminal based Windows session within the Citrix XenApp infrastructure. This has the advantage that corporate data will be both highly mobile and completely secure. GoldenGate is a prototype email, calendaring, and contact application. It tightly integrates with Microsoft Exchange and is designed to run securely in the data center and be delivered to any mobile device via Citrix XenApp and Citrix Receiver.

One of great benefits of a GoldenGate style micro-app is that it can be developed once and delivered across multiple mobile platforms without the need to worry about platform compatibility or deployment concerns. Project GoldenGate can be downloaded from the Citrix Community site. Customers and partners can post questions, comments, and suggestions at the GoldenGate Support / Feedback Forum or send them to goldengate@citrix.com. For an entertaining overview, see Martin Duursma?s GoldenGate demo.

Project Alcatraz

Mobile applications must be both secure and responsive. Project Alcatraz aims to maintain security while minimizing the time it takes for a user to launch and interact with an application.

With a desktop connection to XenApp, the time taken to securely connect to a XenApp session is in line with desktop expectations. In the mobile device space, however, the end user has become accustomed to much more rapid application availability. In addition, the user will tend to need to reconnect more frequently on the mobile device than on the desktop where a static network connection could be expected. As such it is important to streamline that reconnection, without losing security.

There are several approaches to reducing application access delay. One is to provide new ways to re-authenticate the client with Access Gateway when the network connection is re-established. The intent is to dramatically improve the user experience without sacrificing security.

To address the scenario when a connected device may be unattended, lost, or stolen and used by a malicious 3rd party, Project Alcatraz provides a simple PIN challenge mechanism. After some configurable amount of time, the user is challenged to provide the PIN.

Project Alcatraz is intended to address the following:

Enable rapid application launch
Enable rapid application reconnect
Improve the user experience as users move from one network to another
Securely launch the app process on the server and enforce use of PINs

Project Alcatraz can be downloaded from the Citrix Community site. Customers and partners can post questions, comments, and suggestions at the San Francisco Support / Feedback Forum or send them to sanfrancisco@citrix.com.

The Automation Imperative

Autonomic computing is a long sought after IT utopia where datacenters are self regulating, self managing, and self optimize in response to business needs. We are some way from achieving this today. However, a broad range of organizations have been outspoken about the need for improvements in our management models for some years.

In recent years interest in these types of initiatives has grown dramatically in response to increased cost pressures on IT (for example see Nicholas Carr?s ?IT doesn?t matter? ). Improved datacenter management has also become much more plausible due to a combination of the rise of system virtualization and an ongoing drive toward IT process management such as ITIL , standards for datacenter management , and a drive toward datacenter maturity in general.

Ideas common to most of the autonomic computing related efforts include:

Resource sharing through virtualization
Management process standardization
Model and policy driven systems
Multiple layers of management

Why does it matter?

The ideas of autonomic computing overlap a number of key industry concerns. These range from cloud computing (Infrastructure as a Service), Green IT (sensitivity to power use), some of the notions of Enterprise Architecture, modular computing, automation, infrastructure maturity, and the use of business based SLAs to optimize automated IT systems.

Ongoing improvements in Autonomic computing is a core part of where the industry as a whole is headed.

What is Citrix Labs doing?

Citrix Labs has been championing a ?Citrix Autonomic Computing Initiative? for some years. Just some of the areas where we are active are:

Dynamic load and capacity management research ? one outcome of this is the recently released Capacity and Power management functionality in the latest release of XenApp
Working closely with the Microsoft Systems Center team to build our connections with management technologies
Exploring cloud technologies and extensions to Citrix products
Leading cross vendor standardization efforts such as OVF, DMTF, etc.

Our most important partner

One of the roles of Citrix Labs is to drive and coordinate technology collaboration with Microsoft. Microsoft is Citrix?s most strategic partner as the majority of our products build on and extend the capabilities of Microsoft technology. Citrix has been working closely with Microsoft since the company was founded more than 20 years ago. Citrix strives to innovate and add value on top of Microsoft products, and align strategically with Microsoft for optimal field engagement.

This theme is about ensuring that Citrix remains in step, compatible with, and brings value to the Microsoft platform. Aligning with Microsoft preserves customer investments in technology and skillsets. Citrix Labs works closely with the Citrix Business Development team focused on Microsoft to fully cover the Microsoft relationship from technology and technology strategy to field engagement.

Some of the key product intersection points between Citrix and Microsoft are:

Windows Remote Desktop Services, graphics, and RemoteFX technologies
Windows Client and Server
System Center and other Microsoft management technologies
Microsoft Office and SharePoint
Microsoft Azure
Windows Phone

We engage with Microsoft across a broad set of activities for these products in their lifecycles, including:

Technology design and feedback
TAP programs and Beta
Plugfests
Integration, Scalability, and Security testing

"Citrix is a great partner! They know how to partner best with Microsoft! They are the best example for ISV partnership? ? Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft

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