Hi all,
In early October I attended Citrix Converge in Santa Clare USA, and afterward, I co-authored a blog article posted on mycugc.com together with Preston Gallwas, you can find the article here: Link
To do a short follow up to that article and the one I wrote earlier this year, I wanted to write this blog post about what you can expect from Citrix Intelligent Workspace (CIW).
CIW is what we can call the “New” Citrix. Citrix his known for doing secure access to remote applications with excellent user experience, but now we can do more MUCH more!
With CIW, we can now enable users to do tedious tasks very fast and without having to switch applications and therefore avoid the time thief called content switching. With CIW, there is a whole new set of options you can use to help employees get their work done as easy as possible. Leveraging CIW does not mean that all employees now only reside inside the Citrix workspace, but it does mean that if you have a task that should take about 20 seconds to complete, but right now takes more than five minutes, this could be an excellent case for CIW. CIW can integrate with software using APIs, and by leveraging the APIs, you can ask the user for the data needed in a simple form and then have CIW put it into the application itself.
When I was at Citrix Converge, a colleague and I did a demo on stage, showing how easy it was to create a new Citrix VDA image (Citrix worker) by only getting two pieces of information and hitting an “OK” button. The time taking to use CIW to perform this task was about 15-20 seconds, and it would typically take 5-10 mins to kick-off and then the waiting time for the job to complete and then do more manual work, so in total it is more like a 30-60 min task at the moment. As you can see, the time saving is enormous in this case, and no not all cases are like this, but I am betting that there is a lot of these cases out there just waiting to get into CIW.
CIW is not generally available yet but should be out pretty soon, so for the time being; I cannot show you the user experience inside CIW. As soon as I get access to it again, I will do some demos around CIW so you will be able to talk to customers or leverage it in your own company.
I am looking forward to CIW to be GA and go out to talk to customers about the new opportunities and tell them what kind of work this brings to their business. One aspect that might be new to a lot of companies is that IT staff now has to get out into the company and follow colleagues in their daily routines to see where CIW can bring value to them. The discovery of work routines that can be optimized will instantly be agreed on by both the IT staff and the employee that is doing the work. By having both sides agreeing on the optimization, the adoption is also easy since we are now optimizing the work the employees are asking for directly.
One last thing I want to point out is that the actions and user space does NOT have to be Citrix workspace, it can also be Slack, Teams or other platforms that users usually use. I belive that this freedom is pretty unique and will help us drive business with both existing and new customers. The freedom actually opens up new markets where we can help customers in their daily workflows even if they don’t use any Citrix Virtual Apps or Desktops, so looking forward to a lot of new and exciting talks with current and future customers.
I hope that a lot of companies will be open to hearing and using this new side of the Citrix offerings since I can see the benefits of this new product.
Being part of the Citrix Converge event also meant that I am now in the developer program for CIW, so if you have any questions about Citrix CIW, please reach out to me, and I will try my best to answer any questions.