<div>Citrix pioneered desktop virtualisation and cloud-based services for almost 15 years. It is now trying to focus on the future of IT to support work flow through mobile phones. Over the last two years, the proliferation of smartphones from homes to offices have given rise to a trend called bring your own device (BYOD).</div><div> </div><div>Now, this trend creates a small problem for the CIOs of organisations because they have to rethink their security and access policies in managing new devices with multiple operating systems. In the old days, they partnered with one device maker and asked employees to use those devices. Now they have no control over what their business teams bring in to an organization. Citrix is now creating a bridge between the employee world and the IT world where its tools will allow CIOs to integrate any device on to the existing IT system. And it will allow CIOs to control what can be accessed in the organisation and outside the organisation through those devices.</div><div> </div><div><strong>Nabeel Youakim</strong>, vice president, Asia Pacific for Products, at Citrix, tells <em>BW's</em> <strong>Vishal Krishna</strong><strong> </strong>why mobile device management (MDM) is the next big business and about their recent acquisition of Zenprise. </div><div> </div><div><strong>Why is MDM going to be important after the acquisition of Zenprise for Citrix?</strong></div><div>There is a clear signal that organisations are now creating apps within their companies to support teams that bring their own devices. The sales and marketing teams will have their apps, the finance team will have their set of apps and the HR team will have their own apps too. All of them will be put on the cloud and in a common pool. </div><div> </div><div>Therefore CIOs are creating policies where each department has access to their apps based on the levels of management and if it is the senior management there will be a higher access. In the process they have issues of security that have to resolve. Zenprise completes are offering as full BYOD tool provider where the CIO need not worry about integration, security and compute needed for such applications integrated to phones. The Zenprise software allows IT teams to know if the employee is trying to use the device to take sensitive data outside the organisation or if the usage of the application denotes activity that is not under the purview of policy. It is a sort of security structure that is integrated in to our CloudGateway product. </div><div> </div><div><strong>Isn’t the issue of security beyond the organisation now that mobile malware is growing in leaps and bounds?</strong></div><div>Tell me about it, who is building these malware and why specifically for mobile phones. It is a global problem. It is something that we need to know more about. But the CIO has to set policies of security even at the server level and may be control the usage of the internet through phones when accessing the enterprise application outside of the organization.We need understand the malware problem.</div><div> </div><div><strong>Who will take advantage of MDM business in India and which industries can benefit from the same?</strong></div><div>The integration part will be done by the IT services companies and our partner eco-system. It is very important to find the right partners because they will be trying to build our SMB business. Small enterprises may be working out of the public cloud and will leapfrog in to the BYOD era faster than larger enterprises. So, for them the partners will have to play an important role in consulting and implementing BYOD. However, it is the large organisations that will constitute a majority of our business. The best part of Citrix’s tools is that a company need not invest in new back end infrastructure to integrate their devices with enterprise apps. The opportunity is huge because 46 per cent of Indian employees want BYOD and this number will only grow higher in years to come. Surprisingly sales teams of manufacturing companies want BYOD more than other industries.</div><div> </div><div><strong>We talk of data protection, how can we manage mobiles?</strong></div><div>If the employee loses the phone or leaves the organisation the tools are programmed to wipe out the data on the phone. Mobiles are going to change the way we work and it will continue Citrix’s run as company that can identify and catch in on new technology trends.</div><div> </div><div>businessworldonline (at) gmail (dot) com</div><div> </div><div> </div>
