Citrix is furthering its mobility strategy for the channel with the released of Citrix XenClient 5, which enables mobile workers to work across laptops, tablets and smartphones using a virtual desktop – hosted or local – along with their files and documents.
The company said that XenDesktop with XenClient and Citrix ShareFile gives mobile workers a personalized virtual desktop experience along with data synchronization.
XenClient 5 is included as part of XenDesktop and IDC recently concluded that by 2015 the world’s mobile worker population will reach 1.3 billion, representing approximately 37.2 per cent of the total workforce. IDC expects desktop and data to be available wherever mobile workers need to work.
IDC added that VDI has helped drive mobile workstyles, but when users need the full power of their laptop, or need to work offline, a local virtual desktop is more appropriate. This has created a significant opportunity for local virtual desktops to enhance the hosted virtual desktop (VDI) experience. Up until now, options for delivering a consistent personalized local and hosted virtual desktop experience have required complex custom deployments, or compromises in user experience.
“It’s a multi-device world and managing this heterogeneous environment is driving the client virtualization market to grow to $4.1 billion in 2017. Between corporate-owned and personally-owned, many users today have 3 to 4 devices. With the unified profile management updates to XenClient 5, Citrix streamlines the integration with XenDesktop and simplifies the administrator’s processes while improving the user experience as he or she moves between devices,” said Brett Waldman, research manager at IDC.
XenClient 5 integrates Personal vDisk technology already in XenDesktop to enable personalization, and integrates with ShareFile to sync data across local and hosted virtual desktop environments. The integration of Personal vDisk technology is built into the two core components of XenClient:
- XenClient Engine – XenClient is a true Type-1 client hypervisor that runs on bare metal and provides high performance and security, letting users run a centrally managed virtual desktop and lets power users run multiple local virtual desktops simultaneously, side-by-side and in complete isolation. Users of XenClient-powered devices can access their various virtual desktops anywhere, anytime—even while disconnected from the network.
- XenClient Synchronizer – Synchronizer for XenClient enables IT to centrally manage the virtual desktops running locally on PCs as well as manage the devices themselves. Using Synchronizer, IT can centrally back up user data through a secure connection whenever the user connects to the Internet, define security policies, disable lost or stolen PCs, and restore a user’s virtual desktop on any XenClient-based device.