The mobile  -cloud era. That's the next major phase for the IT industry, according to Cisco and Citrix, who announced Wednesday a "significant expansion" of their desktop virtualization partnership.
The companies said the expanded partnership would include a variety of initiatives designed to help enterprise and service-provider customers with leveraging the transition. The announcement was made at the Citrix Synergy conference, now taking place in Barcelona.
'Fundamental Transformation'
We asked Greg Smith, Citrix's director of product management , what is driving the expansion of the partnership. He replied that, "at the high level, we're seeing that the cloud era is leading to a radical redesign of data centers," propelled by "greater enterprise workforce mobility."
A year ago, the companies unveiled a five-year strategic agreement that was intended to accelerate the adoption of desktop virtualization.
On the Cisco corporate blog, Vice President Rick Snyder wrote Tuesday that the past year has resulted in a doubling of their joint business, the deployment of tens of thousands of new virtual desktops, and the positioning of Citrix XenDesktop as the "cornerstone" of Cisco's Virtualization Experience Infrastructure (VXI) solution.
Snyder told us that while the "initial relationship was focused on XenDesktop working with VXI," the companies are now expanding the partnership to focus on mobile workstyles in an integrated cloud solution.
On the same blog, Senior Director of Market Management Shashi Kiran wrote that the expanded partnership with Citrix will include the integration of the Citrix NetScaler application delivery controller into Cisco's Cloud Network Services. Those services include the Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance and its Wide Area Application Services.
Kiran said that the continuing Cisco-Citrix partnership "couples Cisco's leadership in data center and cloud infrastructure with Citrix's strength in application delivery controllers."
Mobile Workstyle, BYOD Solutions
In cloud networking, Cisco said it will expand its L4-L7 Cloud Network Services for data centers and cloud infrastructure into an integrated, multi-services architecture that offers "true cloud service automation " with additional network - and application-level intelligence. The companies said they would develop an integrated cloud solution for enterprise and server providers, utilizing Cisco's Unified Computing System, Nexus Series switching and Open Network Environment, as well as Citrix's Cloud Platform. (continued...)
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