First published on CloudBlogs on May, 06 2014
Considering how quickly things change, and how rapidly companies rise and fall in the tech industry, it’s pretty amazing to think that the partnership between Microsoft and Citrix stretches a quarter century. What’s even more impressive than the longevity, however, is the
success and innovation of this strategic partnership
.
Microsoft takes a lot of pride in how this partnership has become recognized as a model for how to build and maintain a strategic relationship centered on the customer.
From the very beginning of this partnership (back in 1989!) Citrix has regularly integrated the capabilities of the Windows platform and brought to market incredible customer value. Citrix has pushed our platform to be better and to do more. Our platform is better as a result, and jointly we have been able to deliver more complete and more valuable capabilities for our customers.
Our work together has created and defined entire industry categories – such as server-based computing and virtual desktops.
DaaS is a massively important innovation in the IT world, and we are already well underway on another exciting collaboration with Citrix that is going to further empower our customers to enable employee productivity like never before in today’s cloud-first, mobile-first world.
We are currently working with Citrix to expand their market-leading DaaS solutions by providing Microsoft Azure as the platform for
Citrix Workspace Services
.
Citrix Workspace Services is unique because it provides a unified control plane and the ability to deliver multiple services across both public and private clouds. This
hybrid functionality
is something that simply isn’t available in other virtual desktop offerings currently in the market.
Over the past several months I’ve had some rich discussions with industry analysts about the future of desktop virtualization, as it relates to DaaS. In all of these conversations we have agreed that delivering a DaaS offering from the Cloud enables a much broader set of customers to take advantage of the benefits of VDI. Setting up and maintaining a large server farm to deliver a VDI solution is not something for the faint of heart -- these can be gnarly projects with significant up-front spend. DaaS makes VDI an approachable opportunity for enterprises.
The beauty of a DaaS offering from Azure is that the capacity is built and maintained by Microsoft. This means you have very low up-front costs, Microsoft and Citrix are able to constantly add new value, and you can scale on-demand both up and down. We are really excited about this offering.
Looking ahead, Microsoft already has dedicated engineering resources set aside to ensure that Microsoft Azure remains the best platform for Workspace Services. Today there are already over 2,600 Service Providers delivering 350,000 joint Microsoft-Citrix DaaS desktops around the globe, and Microsoft is committed to working with Citrix to extend this model to a growing number of partners and customers.
I’m excited to add another innovative offering to this partnership’s list of accomplishments, and everyone at Microsoft is looking forward to the incredible value this will deliver for our customers. We are excited to see the innovative and valuable ways Citrix will continue to build on our platforms.
One final note:
I’d like to personally thank Mark Templeton for not only being such a strong partner, but for being a mentor and a friend during the time I’ve been here at Microsoft. Mark has not only had a huge impact on the industry, but he’s had a really big impact on me. I’m grateful for the opportunities I’ve had to work with him and learn from him. This company, and this industry, are both better for all his hard work and ingenuity.
