Deploying the iPhone into the enterprise has a number of pain points. Two that we continue to hear are a lack of full disk encryption and developing software. For environment who cannot obtain enterprise developer accounts, we also continue to work through problems with regard to application provisioning. Many companies are also getting tired of trying to deploy applications to too many operating systems. One answer we’ve taken for some of this is to introduce web-based applications with small wrappers around them that are specific to each application/device. But Citrix has stepped up and released Citrix Receiver for iPhone and Dazzle.
Within the Citrix product line you will now be able to provision a thin client-based application and achieve the agility that business units want without the commitment to a specific platform. This means that if your users want Windows Mobile or an iPhone you can publish an application, tailored to their screens and with Dazzle, you can give them the option to choose which applications they want to access, making application provisioning easier for many environments. Because a thin client leaves all of its data on the server, the lack of full disk encryption becomes less of an issue with the iPhone as you can choose to sandbox your business critical data into thin client environments. And finally, you can go to market with solutions that can enhance your business faster in many cases, by leveraging existing efforts and resources.
Overall, we’re happy to add Citrix Receiver in our own portfolio of product offerings. We can now go into any development opportunity with even more options: begin a new application (fat client), deploy a mobile-specific web-based application or bring a thin client solution to the table. From an application lifecycle, being able to look at the iPhone in a similar fashion to how we look at Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X is key to maximizing the capacity an organization towards their the business potential.