by
Brian Madden
Jack Madden has an interesting post on ConsumerizeIT.com where he looks at all the announcements from Citrix Synergy last week and wonders whether Citrix will end up competing with companies like Good Technology? (If they do, Gabe joked that the ad tagline should be "Citrix: Great, not Good.")
The basic idea is that CloudGateway 2 will have the capability to wrap native mobile apps with encryption and policy controls. And Jack noticed that in the keynote, Brad Peterson's iPad had a native iOS mail client controlled and delivered by CloudGateway. (The icon looked like Naethyn's Exchange Mail iOS app.)
So that got us thinking—if Citrix can "wrap" off-the-shelf iOS and Android apps to protect them from spyware, have app-level remote wipe, enable encryption, etc., now they're trading into the territory of companies like Good Technology?
Furthermore, Citrix's ability to "wrap" apps only works if you can get access to the original app package files before it hits the app store. (So you either have to use it for apps that you write yourself or befriend the developer of commercial apps you want to wrap.) That might be a showstopper for some apps. That said, you know Citrix will make their app packages available, so now you might have incentive to use Podio, GoToMeeting, etc. from Citrix since you'll be able to do app-level management of these apps on personal devices.
Very interesting! Check out Jack's full post for details. What do you think?
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