In December of 2014, as part of our innovation program, Citrix acquired a small company called Octoblu. They were doing applied research in the emerging area of the Internet of Things (IoT) and created a free IoT platform that’s been used by many to take their first steps with IoT. Working with the Octoblu team has been a fabulous learning experience for Citrix and, since 2014, we’ve developed a strong stance about the ways IoT can be transformative in the Enterprise. In fact, we are already moving down a path of incorporating major IoT concepts into our core products.
Also, during these years, IoT has matured rapidly as a technology and all the major cloud providers have started to offer IoT platforms. We’ve made the decision that going forward, rather than own our own IoT platform, we will focus on applications of IoT and how they relate to our initiatives around the Future of Work and the Secure Digital Workspace. We are already working with other IoT platform providers to ensure our solutions interoperate.
To this end, we will close down Citrix’s free Octoblu.com cloud service in the next 30 days. We are currently reviewing other options to make the technology available to the developer community; you can watch the Octoblu.com site for more details on how that technology will be made available in the future. If you’re using the free Octoblu web service for important tasks, you can use this time to transition to another platform. Popular destinations include:
As part of our go-forward strategy, you should expect to see much more around IoT from Citrix in 2018. Our Raspberry Pi-powered Workspace Hub technology will become a center point of our Future of Work and Workspace IoT strategy. Our XenMobile service will expand into IoT device management. And expect to see IoT concepts like location services and mapping, beacons, presence sensors, biometrics, and voice recognition play key roles in how our customer will access their Secure Digital Workspaces.
