Chris,

Thanks for getting this discussion going. As you said, this really is a question of priority. There is a big difference between whether we could or should deliver XenApp applications to an iPhone. Every additional platform we support drives overhead and makes the road ahead ever more complex to navigate. For those of you who think you would enable this for your business we would love to hear as much detail as possible about what types of users, applications and business needs you would be planning to serve.

Cheers

Al-

Chris,

Could you also post this on Street Smart and Customer Community?

Marcus

Citrix also need to look at other mobile devices from other companies.

Chris,
THis is awesome! I love the fact that enterprises are finally starting to embrace the Mac OS and the devices that utilize it. As the Mac Guy, I get these requests all of the time and see a definite growth there TF

we all want it for sure, we are physician residents and most of us want it so that we can see patient labs and investigations or otherwise one has to carry an extra PDA

Nishith singh

i mean citirx to be able to run on iphone

Nishith

We were just talking about how this would be very useful at work. Many clients...

It seems like the number of iphone users doesn´t acomplish the money requirements for apple to deploy a iphone citrix-client.

 Need to be Patient...SDK is in the streets

This is interesting... http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Photos-iPhone-running-Windows-XP/0,130061733,339289801,00.htm?omnRef=1337 Sounds like Citrix is already on this..?!?

mark templeton did a demo during the closing keynote of last year's iforum. is is possible to view that video?

When is Citrix releasing a client for the Iphone. the mobile market would explode. . Especially for us in the Healthcare business.

Gimme Gimme Gimme !

This would be extremely useful for us sysadmins on the go! Of course it's one more option to support, but people using this on their iPhone are tech savvy enough to be able to troubleshoot their own problems anyway. I hope this is also available on iPod touch.

I citrix client for iphone would be a great addition. In our hospital it would be a pervasive app that would replace the blackberry. Do it and do it quickly.

Thanks for all the feedback. We are listening...

It's interesting to see the comments about heathcare, I noticed that Epocrates just announced an iPhone app. This will dramatically increase the interest in the iPhone as a healthcare solution as well.   

Citrix for iPhone is a killer app in the healthcare industry. With EMRs like Epic, Cerner, and CPRS served over Citrix ICA (2 of 3 hospitals in my training program are using Citrix right now), and with WiFi becoming more pervasive, Citrix for iPhone will have the power to transform hospital medicine. My former program had a web-based EMR and the ability to look up data on the iPhone made rounds go tremendously more efficiently. This should be a very high priority for the Citrix development team.

MD, Palo Alto

I'm an IT professional who's on-call 50% of the year. I would love to connect up, run a telnet session into a server and get my business done without a laptop. Please make this happen!

I'm a surgery resident training at an institution that uses Citrix at all 3 of it's hospitals. I just got the iPhone 3G today and would definitely use the Citrix client on a daily basis. (I use Citrix at home on my mac currently to connect to Cerner.) I've already downloaded Epocrates and Netter's anatomy app and am waiting for more medical-relevant apps to be developed.

With the new SDK, the iPhone's potential in the professional world is endless!

Please make this a top priority as many of my colleagues are in the process of buying new iPhones.

Thanks!

This is why I don't care much about client-side virtualization. Even though the possibilities offered by disconnected applications are alluring, they come with a huge downside, Windows-only clients.

 The iPhone offers a rich application environment, putting a solid Citrix client on it should be an easy win.

There is an interesting debate over on Brian Madden's site on this current topic. Mostly positive with a few naysayers ..

http://www.brianmadden.com/blog/BrianMadden/Citrix-ICA-client-for-the-iPhone-Would-you-care

I want a Citrix iphone client!

The iphone client would be a tremendous boost to productivity from ANYWHERE.  Just as mobile email has enabled people to be connected (for good or bad) to the office 24/7, an iphone client would provide the same functionality for application and data access.

Mobile email is not perfect.  It does not offer all the flexibility, usefulness, or capabilities as sitting in front of a desktop and banging out a 3 page novel to your boss.  But most people that have a mobile email device would not let you pry it from their twisted little fingers.  Having that same kind of access to any piece of corporate information would be fantastic, despite the obvious limitations that would come from the keyboard/mouse experience.  (Although Apple has done an excellent job with their browser)

Now for this nirvana phone nonsense... Half of the beauty of the iphone is that you don't need ANY peripherals to use it.  Not even a stylus.  I can't count how many people I know who have lost a stylus and end up with a half-usable mobile device until they find a replacement.  I am happy to report that I have been able to keep tabs on all 10 of my fingers for over 30 years now.   Saying that the iphone "needs a dock" is like saying that your sneakers need add on roller skate wheels.  There are already excellent mobile laptop platforms such as the Asus and Macbook Air which are a fraction of the hassle to carry than those from just 3 years ago.  Do I want to own 37 devices?  No.  But I am happy to carry an iphone as my phone and mobile web device, and a lightweight laptop for my mobile computing needs.  When I get to the office, I dock my laptop and voila I have a 24" screen and all the projects I've been working on for years.   If I find myself with the opportunity to work "outside of the office" I am carrying everything I need with me (laptop+power supply) not hoping that there is a dock, screen, or keyboard at my destination.  (good luck with that)

With an ICA client, I would forgo such activities as taking my laptop on vacation (on vacation!!) because I would know that I'd have enough computing power to deal with unforseen circumstances and the occasional work crisis.  Do I need my iphone to become my primary computing device? No, not at all.  Just like I don't need to rollerblade in my nikes.

As the Citrix admin for a medical institute I can safely say that an ICA client for the iPhone would be a huge hit around here. Dr's are probably the most mobile users I've ever supported and they would be chomping at the bits for this!

Our MMR is Citrix-based as well. So are many of the hospital applications we use! As the number of iPhones in our department increases, users consistently ask for Citrix. With Safari, Mail, and VPN working, we need just one more app... Citrix! I would love to beta test if possible!!

Citrix on the iPhone would give us a huge win with the doctors who want to be mobile and not weighed down giving them an ipod touch or iphone with EMR access through Citrix would be win for sure. 

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. Notice I said "having it on my iPhone", not "having it _would_". I already have a 'roundabout' ICA client on my iPhone. The fact that I do, shows why closed source programming DOES NOT WORK.

The way I get Citrix on my iPhone...I had to install VNC on my server at work, and then get the FREE VNC LITE client on my iPhone, then connect to my server at work, open up a browser window, and then connect to metaframe _that_ way. And that's all open source code.

If I can emulate my ENTIRE DESKTOP on my iPhone using open source code with VNC, just think of how incredibly easy it would be for me to write an ICA client for the iPhone, if Citrix would just release an SDK. Now that Apple released their SDK, us coders would have a great client banged out in less than a week.

RELEASE THE CODE stop making us wait for this when we're willing to do the work for free for the sake of our own productivity.

Like some of the comments above, we would like to roll this out in our hospital. A Citrix iPhone client would be awesome for mobile results and ordering. Would likely blow the tablet PCs away!

I am a network engineer in a hospital.  I assure you that if Citrix would release an ICA client for the iPhone we in the IT  department would use it extensively as well as the MANY doctors who currently have iPhones.  It seems an obvious choice for Citrix.

I cannot imagine why you WOULD NOT port Citrix for Iphone. This is a natural marriage that Citrix should be all over. I have been with Citrix since the beginning, and have seen this application grow from a buggy pain in the a%$ to an absolute necessity for any company hoping to save time and money with their users. Back in those days I had to carry two cell phones, a beeper, (remember those!) a huge pda and a laptop!

Citrix allows us to bring our office to the Internet so we can get it from our  home. Why not allow us to carry it in our pocket? As a network engineer, I am on call nearly 100% of the time. That means I am forced to run around with my laptop to nearly everywhere I go. It would be nice to lose my laptop, pda etc and be able to reset Citrix sessions from my cell phone..err I mean Mp3 player...err..I mean camera...err..

I support government fleet agencies all over the world. One of our biggest issues is delivering Citrix to mechanics. Currently we use Winterms but the problem we have is the mechanics wont use them properly because it requires them to get up from undernieth the vehicle for each fault...one vehicle comming back from Iraq may have 50 or more! now if they had Iphones..they could simply register each fault as discovered...even look at manuals and order the replacement parts. All without haveing to crawl from underneith that HMMWV a half a dozen times.

Seems to me that Iphone has solved a lot of technological hurdles for Citrix to get your app out to the masses. Small, sleek, easy to use touch screen and fast...all done for you guys. Just get Citrix on Iphone and watch as the masses take citrix to all kinds of crazy places.

I would love to have a Citrix client for the iPhone so I can access medical information on my patients.  The physicians in my hospital-from the part-time, retired MDs in their 70s to the residents in their 20's-are flocking to the iPhone.  You are missing a great opportunity!

I'm a practising gastroenterologist in a large university hospital, currently using citrix on a PPC (HTC TyTN II) as well as macintosh laptop. Patient information, paging systems, radiology etc is all available through this avenue. The mobile experience on the PPC is somewhat awkward at best for this purpose. Having had a brief 'play' with the VNC offerings currently available for the iphone, it would seem that the iphone's pinch and zooming make it an ideal mobile device to pan one's way around a "virtual remote desktop". I for one would see it moving from the die hard computer geek physicians (um, me) to main stream with such an easy-to-use device.

Do what the Doctor(s) ordered ..  get us an iPhone client !!

I am an IS  Systems manager at a Medical College.  I know a number of physicians who have purchased iphones and would love to be able to have citrix access to view hospital applications.

we are in the process of implementing EMR (epic) in 3 of our 20+ hospitals (the rest to follow).
Citrix for the iphone would be invaluable allowing freedom of access (anytime, anywhere) and mobility for our healthcare providers.

As a network administrator at a law firm, I know myself as well as numerous attorneys would use Citrix for iPhone.  It would be amazing.  Already, there is a free VNC client for iPhone.  Citrix would be slightly more robust and secure, allowing for integrated windows authentication instead of just a plain text password being sent over VNC connection.

 Looking forward to it.  i know you guys will come up with something soon 

Citrix for iPhone would greatly enhance our sales force abilities as well as reduce support issues for the IT department.

Please.

As a Software Engineer from Germany i would really appreciate an iPhone version of the Citrix Client.
It's nice too run XenApp hosted Windows Applications on you notebook, but running XenApp hosted Applications on an iPhone must be awesome!
Thanks to 3G it also would be quite fast...So, in my opinion this is a Must Have for every iPhone user who wants to stay connected.

As an AV staging and rental company we would find a Citrix iPhone client a fantastic addition to our extreme customer service arsenal. It would be a home run to be able to use a Iphone client for our Citrix and R2 solutions and make real-time, on-site adjustments to orders without taking a notepad and pen or a laptop! A iphone client will be a killer app.

Post a Beta!

Cheers,

Jim Lamb

Tech Coordinator  

American Audio Visual Center 

As an IT Professional who is on call 24/7, I can say this would be more then extremely useful for me and the other people I work with.

Myself and my co-workers would be able to have lives without having to carry laptops everywhere we go. We discuss this topic almost daily! How great would it be if Citrix made aClient for the iPhone! We all use VNC already but that doesn't do everything that we need. In fact it hardly does anything we need.

We've been following the news daily hoping to see a release soon and were very excited when we saw the client you were showing off in Melbourne!

I work in the insurance industry and there are only few companies left using a citrix front end. If you don't come out with something fast for the iPhone those companies will change to someone who has or be straight AJAX based for straight internet use! Progressive already has an agent internet gateway without a Citrix front end. Your loss! I could quote even more people at their home/ car!

We don't want blackberries, we want iPhones...but we need citrix.

I work for a company that has about 10,000 workers where the standard way to get to our tools, when away from the office, is through a Citrix connection. There is a growing group of iPhone users in the company that would like to use a Citrix client to access our apps.

Any guidance as to when we could expect to be able to download the application through the Aplle App store would be exciting news.

Thanks,

Hudson

We need Citrix for iPhone.

You have already made a commitment to apple.

Why stop at the iPhone.

It is pretty obvious it will be around for awhile.

The iPhone has already enhanced my ability to support.

Citrix will allow me to leave the laptop home.

Please give us a Citrix client for iPhone.

iPhone with firmware 2.0 has an integrated Cisco VPN Client an with an XenApp Client that will be great when i'm on Travel.

I agree - my company has used thin client for many years and citrix on iPhone would be great for quick and dirty access to the network when out of the office

I'm IT manager at a multi-hospital NHS Trust in the UK with around 3500 users. We use Windows Mobile PDAs with a number of mobile applications and found the biggest limiting factors to be around the reliability of the wireless network connection. Conversely we have found the iPod Touch and iPhone to be completely reliable in this respect. Of course their use is limited to intranet/web based applications so a Citrix client would be a significant bonus. As we are currently examining Virtual Desktops and Mobilised Workers as two key strategies, this would pile up the weight behind a Citrix-based solution as neither VMWare nor Microsoft can compete in this arena.

I don't need to justify $#*! ....just release the friggin client already....