Citrix recently celebrated its first anniversary of becoming a business unit of Cloud Software Group, which enabled us to focus on our core goal: leading secure access and application delivery infrastructure for the enterprise with the best VDI and DaaS, ADC, and Zero Trust capabilities to support you where you are: on-premises, in the cloud, or both.

Looking ahead, we will continue to reinvest in our strengths: our industry-leading flexibility, end-user experience, and Zero Trust security. The Citrix platform is poised to deliver you the best enterprise software that will meet all your application delivery infrastructure needs now and in the future. 

Check out this video where Calvin Hsu, VP of Citrix Product Marketing, discusses the vision and strategy of Citrix for 2024. 

Citrix vision in 2024: Simplification, flexibility, and security

The IT industry has changed quite a bit in the last few years from office-based workers, to remote-only workers, and now to hybrid workers taking their work on the go. This rise in user locations, endpoints, and networks has led to sprawling IT complexity. And this complexity doesn’t just come from the end users – modern application environments are highly distributed, with applications deployed across multiple public clouds, on-premises data centers, and edge locations. If you’re seeing this in your environment, you’re not alone. 53 percent of information technology decision-makers say that their environment is more complex than it was 2 years ago. Ultimately, distributed environments create challenges, leading to increased costs and operational overhead.

The Citrix platform has evolved to support complex enterprise IT environments, providing simplicity without sacrificing the flexibility to use any cloud or hypervisor. The Citrix platform enables you to deliver any application to end users – from virtual apps to SaaS apps and anything in between – allowing you to consolidate your deployments and reduce management overhead. 

Deliver any application securely with the Citrix platform

That’s just flexibility from the admin perspective. For your end users, we’re here to make application access easy and secure. With adaptive security controls, WAF, and a Zero Trust approach, we’re here to ensure that your resources are kept safe, even for unmanaged endpoint devices. Security doesn’t have to lead to a reduced end user experience either. From our industry leading peripheral support, ensuring they can get critical work done, to our proprietary HDX protocol, and our industry-leading low latency ADC and secure connectivity through Secure Private Access (SPA), we give you the tools for a seamless end user experience, no matter the location. 

We want you to have everything you need to power your application delivery infrastructure across your entire enterprise. 

Focus on adoption and value

Adoption and value are the areas where we will focus our execution in 2024, from the product team all the way to the account team in your region. We will help you plan your Citrix deployments, upgrades and migrations, and ensure you are getting the most value from your investment.

Targeting our core industries

As a fundamental component of your IT infrastructure, Citrix plays a crucial role in industries like healthcare, financial services, and the public sector. Each industry has different user priorities in how they use our solutions and problems Citrix solves. In 2024, you’ll see even greater focus on our strategic customers in these verticals to further identify their unique needs and develop even more innovative features. 

Healthcare

For healthcare customers, we have developed hundreds of capabilities specifically for their needs, and we are continuing our investment. Clinical users often use tap-and-go authentication for easy, passwordless access to mobile workstations (workstations on wheels or WOWs) which connect to a wide variety of peripherals such as printers or dictation devices. Without Citrix, this would be an integration nightmare with costly distributed PC management tools, but virtualization and HDX technology simplifies it all. We have even expanded our tap-and-go integrations to include AuthX, on top of Imprivata. These users also require fast, reliable access to their work no matter where or what device they connect from. They also often require access to electronic medical records (EMRs) like Epic, Cerner, AllScripts, etc. which are often hosted by third-party companies, introducing complexity into the environment – unless you have Citrix to unify the end-user experience and the admin policies. 

Financial Services

Financial services businesses also continue to drive our roadmap to support a wide variety of peripherals, like Bloomberg terminals and complex eight-monitor arrangements. Citrix also provides the unified “front door” to a multitude of different enterprise applications, whether client-server, Windows, web-based, SaaS and in-house custom developed. But in addition, financial services institutions also require high-powered, lightning fast machines to make trades and transact on market information in real time, which can only be achieved from bare-metal performance that only Citrix can support. These institutions also need to support their retail branches, which can mean supporting thousands of locations outside of the main offices with their own unique point-of-sale applications and devices, such as mobile phones and tablets. For these use cases, Citrix will continue to work with key partners like Apple, so we can continue to do things like deliver multi-monitor, mouse and keyboard and Stage Manager support for iPads.  

Public Sector

Public sector agencies have stringent security controls that are governed by law. These agencies operate environments that are locked down and highly controlled by the internal IT teams with elevated clearance. Citrix continues to invest in our hybrid cloud solutions, so whether they want to use a new sovereign cloud or keep things on-prem in a secured site, we have an answer for them. We also provide extensive role-based access controls to enable restricted access resources within a single environment or across different security domains as needed, whether in air-gapped public clouds or customer-hosted on any hypervisor.  From user devices to the data center, these customers must maintain security standards at every step and Citrix is committed to delivering capabilities as the geopolitical landscape evolves rapidly.

More features for more customers

All of these capabilities are important, but ultimately, if you, as the customer, don’t have access to the features, aren’t aware, or don’t know how to implement them, it’s all meaningless. That’s why a key part of this strategy is our massive simplification of our products and services, announced by Citrix General Manager Sridhar Mullapudi. 

This simplification puts more of our features in the hands of even more customers, instead of being locked behind different editions, add-on and professional service offerings. Gone are the confusing array of product editions, add-ons, complex license tracking, and nuanced functionality limitations. You will no longer need to pick and choose which features to buy based on price — you will have full access to the functionalities built into our platform. 

• App and Desktop Virtualization: Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops Premium and Citrix DaaS Premium for the best enterprise app and desktop delivery platform for securing and simplifying hybrid deployments. 
• Application Delivery and Security: NetScaler for high-performance application delivery with comprehensive security and end-to-end observability
• Monitoring and Insights: Citrix Analytics for Performance & Security for streamlined monitoring and troubleshooting across complex and hybrid Citrix landscapes end-to-end. uberAgent complements and extends these capabilities.
• Secure Access: Secure Private Access, Citrix Endpoint Management, and Citrix Enterprise Browser to increase productivity by providing a unified portal for all virtual and non-virtual apps.

With NetScaler included in the platform, we are driving Citrix and NetScaler development closer than ever before. As the only application delivery controller (ADC) that is fully interoperable with Citrix for both on-premises and cloud environments, NetScaler provides secure access so your workforce can access their virtual and SaaS-based applications from anywhere, on any device, across any network. NetScaler is also a leader in the enterprise application delivery market, and our customers can benefit from moving their non-virtual application delivery and security use cases to NetScaler as a part of the Citrix platform.  For more details about the changes to NetScaler, please click here.

To see the full list of functionalities, check out our feature matrix.

Continued investment in hybrid

Delivering hybrid capabilities has been, and will continue to be, a defining strategy for Citrix.

Last year, we laid out a roadmap for 2023 to aid our customers in their hybrid journey. This roadmap included things like an updated StoreFront UI, Web Studio for on-premises, and Workspace APIs for customizations. Not only did we deliver on those goals, we also brought other highly requested features on-premises like the WEM Web Console and Autoscale. And we’re just getting started.

Our focus for development in the next year aligns with four key categories: consolidating and optimizing costs, protecting business-critical apps and data, reducing operational complexity, and delivering exceptional user experiences anywhere. 

Learn more

To learn more about our new Citrix Platform announcements, check out our website or our latest blog from Sridhar Mullapudi, Citrix General Manager. 

To stay updated on the status of our planned enhancements for on-premises and cloud deployments of Citrix, check out our roadmap at our Citrix Roadmap site.