At Citrix, we believe that we have a unique opportunity to unleash a new era in productivity. After waves of technology, the last decade has seen employee productivity in the workplace stagnate.
A new wave is coming, one that will create a tremendous opportunity to deliver a better, smarter work experience for employees. This new wave of innovation will redefine employee engagement and productivity by organizing, guiding, and automating work, empowering employees to reach their full potential. This is Citrix’s vision for the Future of Work, and to accelerate our strategy, we acquired Sapho, a leading micro-app platform, on November 15, 2018.
Here, we will cover the evolution of Citrix Workspace, how we plan to integrate Sapho capabilities into it, and what it all means for Sapho customers.
But first, let’s review how Citrix Workspace supports our customers’ digital workspace initiatives and provides a unified, modern experience for organizing work across disparate homegrown, legacy on-prem, and cloud applications.
Citrix Workspace: A Unified Experience for Organizing Work
Whether you are a multinational bank with 300,000 employees or a high-growth regional hospital system with 1,000 employees, you are likely dealing with the reality of application infrastructure: myriad systems in different environments (on-prem and in cloud), with different identity schemas and multiple security protocols. For end users, this means spending significant amounts of time finding and switching between apps and systems, combined with the frustration of lost and forgotten passwords.
With Citrix Workspace, we saw an opportunity to redefine the employee experience through a unified digital workspace experience for organizing work. We delivered unified and secure access to all end-user applications (virtual and SaaS), content across any data source, and best-in-class security on any device. Citrix Workspace offers an elegant solution to customers leveraging the entire Citrix portfolio of best-in-class products in virtualization, content collaboration, endpoint management and networking.
Disparate experiences for SaaS applications, virtual apps and desktops, and content on web, mobile, and desktop have been unified into a single, secure digital workspace experience that delivers role-based capabilities to employees and their collaborators.
On-premises or cloud-hosted Windows applications (hosted by Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops) can be aggregated alongside SaaS applications. On-prem-hosted, cloud virtual desktops are available alongside Windows Virtual desktops from Azure. Files from Citrix native cloud storage, OneDrive, network drives, SharePoint or on-prem storage are aggregated and available in a unified content collaboration experience. Analytics and device-management capabilities provide native device and information-flow protection through predictive, machine learning-driven security analytics. For the employees of our customers, the value proposition is obvious: a single, personalized location to launch into work.
The Next Evolution of Citrix Workspace
Organizing work is the first step in a journey toward the future of work. In a world increasingly augmented by the power of artificial intelligence, companies have a unique opportunity to redefine the employee experience and radically improve personal productivity and employee engagement.
We are helping customers take the next steps in that journey by evolving Citrix Workspace to guide and automate work and minimize busy work, back office tasks and interruptions. We want to empower employees to be more productive by helping them focus on value creation. With the Sapho acquisition, Citrix accelerates its vision for productivity in the workspace.
Integration of the Sapho technology augments existing Citrix Workspace capabilities by making line-of-business transactions available and actionable as a simple, unified, and intelligent work feed. Actions, tasks, and data are aggregated across applications to provide a consolidated place for initiating new micro workflows (e.g. approvals, proactive BI, escalations, data requests). Leveraging Sapho technology delivered as a cloud service, Citrix Workspace will integrate with leading enterprise applications such as Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft PowerBI, and SAP Concur and will help customers deliver a modern, task-based experience on top of legacy on-prem and homegrown systems.
At Citrix, we are committed to give employees choice, and Citrix Workspace reaches employees where they want to work. We will expand our integrations with the tools and applications employees use on a daily basis such as Outlook, Gmail, Microsoft Teams, Slack, SharePoint, push notifications, and more and enable employees to easily access and share content and application data through micro-apps, helping them to get work done whenever and wherever they want.
Path Forward for Customers
Having more intelligent capabilities within Citrix Workspace unleashes significant benefits for Citrix customers:
- Experience – A fully managed suite of cloud services enables customers to focus their time and energy to create better experiences and value for their organizations.
- Choice – Citrix is committed to powering hybrid-cloud deployments to enable customers to migrate their experience to the cloud but keep their data on-prem when integrating with on-premises data. Citrix Workspace already supports hybrid-deployment capabilities for content and will be looking to adopt a similar architecture for application data.
- Security – Our customers can reduce the cognitive overhead their employees experience. Employees should not have to worry about phishing attacks and whether someone is trying to steal information from them. They need to focus on getting their job done. Citrix protects customers’ information by monitoring and securing information flows in a totally new way, leveraging machine learning to understand normal and abnormal usage and information flows without requiring threat-modeling investments.
- Productivity (through analytics) – Citrix is investing heavily in a bespoke AI system designed to consume and understand enterprise-data flows. Through an intelligent graph leveraging Citrix data and other graphs (e.g. Microsoft), Citrix Workspace can enable better recommendations, findability of information, and automation of processes and workflows.
Citrix will provide programs to help Sapho customers transition to the cloud-based Citrix Workspace (which will include the Sapho capabilities) when it becomes available, making the transition as seamless as possible.
These are exciting times for redefining employee engagement and productivity. By organizing, guiding, and automating work, Citrix is empowering employees to reach their full potential.
