Pay attention to technology prognosticators (yes, like me) for long and you’ll hear one word repeated again and again and again: Cloud. Specifically, hybrid cloud.
Hybrid cloud technology unifies all the applications from all the platforms, whether they happen to be enterprise or on-prem applications, applications deployed in a public cloud, or mobile applications and delivers them in a consistent way across any device. And as we hurtle toward the close of 2017 and look ahead to 2018, it’s hybrid cloud, as I mentioned in a blog post recently, that will drive digital transformation. But the way it will drive it might not be what you expect.
Right now, it seems like every company under the sun has its own public cloud, so it might seem like the Cloud market is oversaturated. I say that couldn’t be further from the truth.
You see, public clouds are becoming increasingly specialized; everyone seems to have their own. From Salesforce and SAP, to companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and IBM, each has a cloud with its own focus, its own personality. Each cloud has its own… superpower.
Take the companies I mentioned above – each a Citrix Partner – as examples. Each of their cloud platforms performs its functions similarly to the others, but to vastly different ends. For example, Microsoft’s cloud is Office 365-centric. Google is focused on machine learning and analytics, Amazon on its global footprint with AWS and the ability to be wherever its customers are. For IBM, the focus is on IoT, and so on.
So, in spite of the fact that all of these platforms are out there, presenting the world with myriad choices to the point where it feels like the cloud world is converging on itself, what’s actually happening is a divergence.
How, might you ask, does Citrix fit into all of this?
As it turns out, when it comes to cloud, Citrix’ superpower is choice.
Citrix Cloud provides the control plane that allows our customers to use the pieces of whichever other clouds they wish. If a customer wants to host applications on AWS, others on Azure, and still others with Google, Citrix provides the environment where it all works in concert. While our partners each have a specific focus, ours is on making our customers’ businesses – and their lives – work better.
You see, Citrix isn’t competing with any of these companies or clouds; no. We are enabling them by orchestrating an experience that allows our customers to use the pieces of each that they like, while providing them with rich analytics, so they can identify and address application performance and security issues across their infrastructure, in addition to reducing operational costs and simplifying tasks. At the end of the day, we want to help our customers be successful, and Citrix Cloud offers the flexibility to get them there.
This “superpower” of choice makes it possible for customers to maintain maximum consistency; we give them the same experience, whether they’re working in the office, in a coffee shop, in a plane, or on the beach. We give them the same, consistent experience, no matter where the applications “under the hood” are, whether hosted, mobile, or SaaS-delivered, or whether that’s in a public cloud, a private cloud, or in an on-prem deployment. Most importantly, we deliver this experience securely, so that people can move and do their work the way they want to.
2018 will be the year of hybrid cloud, mark my words. And amid the swirl of clouds, both public and private, Citrix will be here, giving customers – and their customers – the choice and flexibility they need to find their superpower.
