Citrix and Microsoft Announce Huge Enterprise Partnership at Citrix Synergy

Citrix took to the stage at their annual Citrix Synergy conference to announce their decision to select Microsoft Azure as its preferred strategic cloud for the future of their enterprise technology. This expansion of their partnership with Microsoft hopes to meet the needs of the modern workforce with application and desktop virtualization in the cloud, network delivery and enterprise mobility management. This partnership will also benefit joint customers of both Citrix and Microsoft and drive their workplace productivity by giving them a compatible and joint base to operate. Citrix and Microsoft are working together on new integrations between Citrix XenMobile, NetScaler and the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS), based on customer demand.

“Companies of all sizes across all industries around the world have an amazing opportunity to embrace digital transformation and empower their people to work productively from anywhere at any time,” said Kirill Tatarinov, president and CEO of Citrix. “Our customers are asking Citrix and Microsoft to work closer together to help them fully leverage innovations like Windows 10, Office 365 and Azure. This enhanced partnership ensures we can be more agile in responding to our customers’ needs and help them accelerate the move to digital business.”

While this new endeavor will benefit far more than just enterprise mobility, here are the details surrounding the EMM benefits:

To further help companies deliver great productivity experiences for their employees, while enabling IT professionals to help protect company data across both cloud and on-premises applications, Citrix and Microsoft are integrating Citrix XenMobile and NetScaler with the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS.)

Citrix NetScaler will integrate with EMS to provide virtual private network capabilities for more secure, identity-based access to on-premises applications on Microsoft Intune-managed devices. This will give customers a broad array of options for managing access to on-premises applications in an increasingly mobile-first world.

In addition, the Citrix Worx Mail and Forms applications, ShareFile enterprise file share and sync and Citrix Receiver will support EMS, so that customers can manage and secure these mobile app experiences using the same mobile application management capabilities used to manage Office 365 and SAP Fiori apps.

“Our relationship with Citrix has always been founded on the commitment to making our mutual customers successful by empowering their people to be more productive,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Cloud and Enterprise at Microsoft. “By selecting Azure as its preferred and strategic cloud, Citrix is helping companies mobilize their workforces to succeed in today’s highly competitive, disruptive and global business environment.” Read the Microsoft blog post about today’s news here.

This agreement provides enterprises with more reasons than ever to partner with Citrix and Microsoft, in order to optimize productivity across all devices that modern users demand, while ensuring enhanced compliance, manageability and IT cost efficiency.

Check out the official statement from Citrix for more information on the other announcements from Microsoft and Citrix from Synergy 2016.