It looks like Citrix is in the mood to conquer the mobile workspace.
Back in January 2013, Citrix acquired Zenprise, a player in the a MDM (Mobile Device Management)arena.
On February 20 2013, Citrix launched its mobile device management suite, re-branding the Zenprise name to XenMobile, to add to the long list of Citrix Xen-strategy brand names: XenApp, XenDesktop, XenServer, XenClient and now XenMobile
XenMobile MDM and the Mobile Solutions Bundle became available to the public on February 25, 2013.
With the XenMobile launching, Citrix plans to manage data, mobile apps and security policies too.
Citrix is already investing heavily in cloud infrastructure and with the addition of this mobile bundle; Citrix is trying to be the one stop shop for managing mobile devices and link it to some sort of cloud infrastrucure. ZenPrise former CEO and now VP and GM of Mobile Solutions at Citrix, Amit Pandey, stated that Citrix is now taking mobile device management, secure browsing, application wrapping and tunneling technology, federated identity and access policies and bundling it together.
XenMobile main components manage applications, mobile data and devices.
This chart gives a good ilustration of the scope of XenMobile:
With aproximately 20 companies in the MDM arena, Amit Pandey expects to see a lot of consolidation within the next two to three years. Standalone MDM companies should either fold or be acquired by their bigger competitors and other companies . It is survival of the fittest all over again!
XenMobile will come in two packages. The first one is MDM only. Citrix MDM starts at $40/device/year. The second one has a complete mobile stack management platform, ideal for large organizations.
With this latest acquisition, Citrix has completed 34 acquisitions since 1997, an average of two acquisitions per year. (source Wikipedia )
This is a modest number when compared to Microsoft, who has bought 146 companies since 1987, purchased stakes in 61 companies, and made 25 divestments (sale of subsidiaries, e.g. Expedia, which was spun-off in 1999)
But keep in mind that Microsoft sales is close to 75 Billion dollars per year and Citrix sales is not even 3 billion dollars a year or 25 times smaller, in Sales figures. But the purchase power has a ratio of almost 5 to 1 instead (146 x 34). So, a company 25 times smaller than Microsoft has an appetite 5 times bigger than its bigger counterpart (and in a shorter period of time too)!
Part of this text was based on Larry Dignan’s article on ZDnet
